Shinobi Master Senran Kagura: New Link

~ the eulogy ~

New Link was Japan-only at the store layer. That is a narrower claim than being unknown abroad: the game carried an English title, Shinobi Master Senran Kagura: New Link, and English-speaking players did reach it, through a Japanese Apple ID or through QooApp with a community glossary for the menus. A Western release was the one thing it never got. For seven and a half years the way in was a workaround.

The game was an auto-battler with a wardrobe attached. Senran Kagura had been a fighting series on Nintendo handhelds since 2011, built on ninja girls and a quantity of fanservice its own producer was happy to describe in interviews, and the mobile entry kept the cast while handing the combat over to turn-based squads that largely fought themselves. What you spent your actual time on was collecting characters and then dressing them for dioramas you could pose and photograph. Bullet developed it. Marvelous and Honey Parade Games published it.

It launched on iOS and Android on 29 November 2017 and then widened without ever leaving Asia, reaching China in August 2018 and Korea in January 2019, with a DMM build for PC arriving in between on 7 November 2018. Then it just ran, outlasting the console line it had been spun off from.

~ the dossier ~

~ the japan-only part ~

The series' content is the reason this one stayed where it was. The Senran Kagura console games were localized, so the franchise was not unexportable in principle. A free-to-play mobile game whose monetization is costume gacha is a harder proposition than a handheld fighter, because rating boards and app stores read that material differently in every country, and the simplest answer available to a publisher is to not try.

So the audience outside Japan was self-selected and technical. You needed a second store account and enough Japanese to follow a limited-time banner. Nothing you spent on it was recoverable in your own currency either. That filter is why the game could run as long as it did with almost no English-language press and still have people posting diorama screenshots on the last day.

~ the last chapter ~

Honey Parade Games announced the closure on 28 March 2025 and set the date for 30 May, which left two months of runway. The final chapter of the main scenario went up in April, so the story was finished on purpose instead of being abandoned mid-arc, which is not what usually happens when a gacha's revenue stops clearing its costs. Service ended at 2:00 p.m. JST on 30 May 2025.

~ what owners kept ~

On 4 June 2025 the app updated into an offline version. The story stayed, and so did the dioramas. Everything that needed a server went. That cut included the PC side, because the offline build shipped for iOS and Android only, so the DMM players got the shutdown without the consolation prize.

Then in July 2026 Marvelous announced Shinobi NEXUS Senran Kagura for phones and for PC through DMM, set three years after New Link and carrying part of its cast forward. The sequel carries the story forward. The account you spent seven years building stays behind with the servers that held it, and those have been off since May 2025.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »