Totsugeki! Kassen Stadium

» see hangame.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Hangame opened Totsugeki! Kassen Stadium on 22 July 2009. It was a real-time battle game set in the Sengoku period, free to play with paid items, and the genre line on the official site read Sengoku swarming-battle action game. You built a deck of eight warlord cards. Four went out at the start and the rest came in as replacements when those fell, and the match ended when one side's castle reached zero.

The cost stat on a card was koku, the rice yield of a fief. Your own level was a daimyo rank, and raising it raised the total koku you were allowed to field at once. Cards came out of a gacha you spun either with battle points earned by playing or with Hancoin, the currency Hangame already ran across its whole portal, so the game never issued a paid currency of its own. Warlords were drawn from two periods, Kawanakajima and Sekigahara, and the Sekigahara set includes men who did not live to see Sekigahara.

Three troop types existed at launch in a loop where each beat one of the others. Archers arrived on 14 July 2009 with the open beta, as a fourth type sitting outside the loop, and 4Gamer wrote that week that it threw a stone into the balance.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the president admitted ~

The announcement was held on 28 May 2009 at Asakusa Hanayashiki, one of the oldest amusement parks in Japan. A professional kodan storyteller named Kirari Kanda hosted it from a raised lectern and opened by performing the Battle of Mikatagahara, which is Tokugawa Ieyasu's most famous defeat. An advertisement for the game had been mounted on top of the park's drop tower. Akira Morikawa, then head of NHN Japan, spoke first.

Shin Unozawa, president of Bandai Namco Games, replaced him at the lectern and said the company's online titles had not done well. Only Famista Online and the Gundam Network Operations series were still going, and he put the cause down to operating know-how: a packaged game ships finished, while an online game's launch is where the work starts. He added that working alongside NHN Japan's staff had shown his developers they had mislaid the hospitality they were supposed to have learned in arcades. Morikawa, the man he had taken the stage from, would put out LINE two years later.

~ twenty-five to thirty-five ~

The business plan, presented at the same event by Makoto Kamata of NHN Japan, named the target out loud: men between twenty-five and thirty-five, a bracket Hangame had few of. Atsushi Shiozawa, producing on the Bandai Namco side, said his understanding of how online games differ from console games came from visiting Korean studios in person in 2005, and that he wanted this title to follow Famista Online out into the rest of Asia. Kassen Stadium needed a Japanese Hangame account and a Windows client, and Japanese was the only language it ever shipped in. It never left.

~ a castle for my home ~

Ranked play opened on 1 September 2009 behind a two-week campaign. The rewards were an equipment card called the bamboo-basket standard and an item for your Hangame My Home, the avatar apartment the portal handed every account: a Totsugeki Kassen Stadium castle, distributed late that month. In January 2010 the game ran a tie-in with Gurunavi, the restaurant listings site, where ordering food got you a card whose name was a pun on the word for takeout. That was the last thing 4Gamer wrote about it.

Service ended on 27 May 2010. The campaign page from September 2009 is still being served today at static.hange.jp, in Shift_JIS, under a copyright line reading 2009 NHN Japan Corporation and a footer asking you to view the site in Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0. Hangame itself is very much alive. Ask it for the game's directory now and it hands back a 404.

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