Shingun Destroy

» see shingun-destroy.bngames.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Bandai Namco maintains a shared science fiction continuity called UGSF, which ties together arcade games it has been publishing since Galaga. It is the sort of internal lore project most companies keep in a binder and never mention. In September 2014 the company put a free phone game inside it. Shingun Destroy was set in the year 2810 on a planet named Orius, it carried the UGSF mark in its backgrounds and its opening, and among the things attacking you was the space insect Galaga itself.

The player was the commander of a unit of schoolgirls summoned out of their own world into that one. What the girls drove into battle were World War II tanks, named and modeled: a Panther and a Jagdpanther, a Churchill and a Matilda, a T-34 in both gun calibers, and the superheavy Maus that Germany built twice and never sent anywhere. Each girl had a tank she preferred, which raised her numbers if you seated her in it, but you were free to put anyone in anything. The enemies were kaiju. The tone was not what any of that suggests.

This one left no trace on me, and there was no route by which it could have. It shipped on the Japanese store only, in Japanese, and the thing it asked of you daily was reading short comic scenes whose jokes depend on already knowing forty characters by name. That is a product with a hard language floor underneath it. Eighteen months was never going to be long enough for it to become legible to anyone standing outside Japan, and nothing about it was built to try.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

The combat came from somewhere specific. It used the rotation battle system that Namco had built years earlier for Seven and reused in Venus & Braves, and the staff who made Shingun Destroy had worked on Seven. Your squad stood in three rows. The front row fought, the middle row supported the front, and the back row healed, and you could rotate anyone backward when the front stopped holding. On a 2014 phone, free to download, this was a fifteen-year-old console idea wearing new clothes.

The rest was collection. Roughly forty girls, each with a personal motto printed on her card, each with alternate versions: swimsuits, kimono, a mechanic's overalls, a costume borrowed from whatever Bandai Namco property was visiting that month. Idolmaster came through. So did God Eater. Crossover events were the only content in the game with full voice acting, which tells you where the budget lived.

~ three times a day ~

The thing people actually logged in for was not the tanks. It was a feature called sungeki, short comedy playlets that refreshed three times a day, every day, building out each character through jokes rather than through quests. One girl was a terrible singer who slowly got better over the months. Another was an excellent cook whose creative ambitions ruined everything she made. A gacha game is usually a slot machine with a story bolted on; this one was closer to a daily comic strip that happened to have a slot machine in it, and the strip updated while you were eating breakfast.

~ the long tail ~

Bandai Namco announced the end at seven in the evening on 6 January 2016 and gave players until 7 March. The notice carried no reason, which is standard. There were two printed novels by then, which told the same story with the girls in different tanks, and those still exist on shelves. The game itself does not.

What survived is the continuity it was filed into. UGSF still absorbs Bandai Namco games, still runs its invented timeline forward past the year 2810, and still counts Shingun Destroy among the things that happened in it. A free phone game got written into a forty-year fictional history and then lasted a year and a half inside it, Permanent inside the lore, temporary everywhere a player could reach.

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