Super Sentai Legend Wars

» see sslw.bn-ent.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Super Sentai has been on Japanese television continuously since 1975. Five colored suits and a giant robot, with a new cast every spring, year after year, for half a century. By 2016 that was forty separate series, which is forty sets of heroes that had never met and never could, because each one ends when its year ends and the actors go off to do something else.

Super Sentai Legend Wars was Bandai Namco's phone app for fixing that. It launched on 6 September 2016, free with item sales, and it was a deck builder: you assembled a team of up to five Sentai from across the whole franchise and sent them into 3D battles against monsters from any era. A hero from 1975 could stand next to one from the season currently airing. For a seven-year-old in 2016 whose grandfather had watched Gorenger, that is a reasonable thing to want.

Pre-registration passed thirty thousand before launch. By the time it closed the app covered forty-four series, Gorenger through Kiramager, which is the entire televised run of the franchise up to that point. The final event was a crossover between Kiramager and Ryusoulger, the 2020 and 2019 teams, which is precisely what the app existed to let you stage.

Bandai Namco posted the shutdown notice on the evening of 30 June 2020. Sales of the in-game gem currency stopped on 30 July, with already-purchased gems usable to the end, and premium coins voided at closure regardless of their own printed expiry dates. The service ended on 31 August 2020, six days short of its fourth anniversary. No reason was given, then or since. The last update had shipped on 23 June, a week before the announcement.

~ the dossier ~

~ forty-four series in one deck ~

The thing this app did that nothing else did was hold the whole franchise in one place at one time. Toei's Sentai model is built on annual replacement: the toys change every February and last year's heroes become merchandise history. Crossover films happen, but they are events, and they pick a handful of teams. An app with all forty-four of them sitting in a selectable list is a catalog rather than an event.

That also made it fragile in a specific way. A catalog of forty-four licensed TV properties is forty-four sets of character likenesses, and a rights position that has to be maintained for as long as the servers run.

Nothing about the closure suggests the licensing was the trigger, and I will not claim it was. But a game whose entire value is breadth of license is a game with an unusually expensive floor under it.

~ what a kids' game shutdown looks like ~

Sixty-two days passed between the announcement and the end, and thirty-two of those were after currency sales stopped. That is a tidier wind-down than many adult titles get, and it reflects something real about this corner of the market: the money in a children's app comes through a parent's payment method, and the consumer-protection expectations around that are strict enough in Japan that publishers build the calendar carefully.

What it did not get was preservation. No offline build was made, and no successor inherited the roster. The official site redirects to the Bandai Namco homepage now, and the Twitter account closed with the service. Forty-five years of television went into that app and came back out of it as nothing at all.

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