ZOIDS FIELD OF REBELLION

~ the goodbye ~

Zoids began as model kits: wind-up and motorized plastic animals with weapons on them, from Tomy, running since the 1980s and relaunched several times through anime and games built on top of the toy line. The thing that died on 27 July 2018 was none of that. It was a multiplayer online battle arena for phones, four players against four, published by Takara Tomy with Eighting doing the development.

It opened on 18 April 2017 on iOS and Android and picked up PC play through AndApp that December. There was a television commercial with Akio Ohtsuka doing the voice work, which for a mobile title is real money spent. Then it closed at 11:00 on a Friday morning, 465 days after it opened. The abbreviation everyone used was ZOIDS FOR.

It was the second Zoids game built for phones, so the platform was familiar ground for the license even though this particular genre was not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a toy company builds a moba ~

The genre choice is the whole story. A MOBA needs a crowd online at the same moment and sorted by skill, all of them willing to spend twenty minutes losing to strangers and then come back tomorrow. A model-kit property sells something like the inverse of that, a thing you own by yourself on a shelf. The kits do not need anybody else to be playing.

I came to Zoids late and sideways, the way most people outside Japan did, through the toys turning up in shops long after the series that was supposed to explain them. That works well enough for a model kit. It is useless for a game needing seven other people awake in the same hour as you.

~ the reboot that was not this one ~

In 2018, the same year the MOBA shut, Takara Tomy announced ZOIDS WILD: a new series built around a completely new line of model kits, which is to say a relaunch of the thing the company actually knows how to sell. The mobile battler and the kit reboot crossed inside a single calendar year, headed opposite ways, and ZOIDS WILD went on to get its own anime and several years of releases.

Fifteen months of service is short enough that the servers were off before most of the audience heard the game existed.

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