This is the latest Kamen Rider arcade game. It’s a touchscreen game where your group of Kamen Riders battles against another group. Gameplay is simple at the lowest levels, and it’s impossible to lose. I imagine it’s a lot of fun for kids to touch the screen to use their attacks, like playing on a massive iPad.
It’s an IC card game, and a card is dispensed every time you play (¥100). You can also just buy additional cards for ¥100 apiece. I’ve got over a dozen cards now; you can see my best ones above.
The above is the view as you play. The screens are massive and tower over you (only the lower one is a toushscreen). Just below the bottom screen you can see I’ve placed five cards into scanners: four riders and an equipment card. You do this during setup, and it’s fun how the game scans and loads each rider as you do it.
As I said gameplay is simplistic but dynamic, and the animations are fun to watch. I haven’t yet ‘got into’ Kamen Rider so I only know a few characters, but it seems there’s loads of them in this game.
I played this a bit in January, and much more this trip. Every time the game was more or less the same, where only my riders varied as I received and used new cards. I knew there was a way for the game to progress if I could use a ‘license’, but I couldn’t find one until my last day on Sendai:
These are given out in arcades, and have unique codes that let you create your account. Every time you play and scan your license, the game loads your save. With this, the game opens up so much! (I blanked out the ID number since there’s some personal info linked to my Rider account.)
With a license you now progress through the game, fighting more difficult and complicated opponents. You’re also scored and this gets saved to per-arcade and national rankings.
You receive experience to level up your riders, and unlock lots of items the use of which I don’t know yet. You get personal experience as well to level up your account level (which unlocks new battles and other features).
There’s even an upgrade grid that you fill out with points you earn by using various attacks in the game!
Here’s my player card (which can be customized as well) showing my progress so far. I’m level 4! 🙂
With a license, this game becomes very much like a mobile game played in an arcade. There are daily items to obtain, daily quests to complete, and various other benefits awarded for regular play. Imagine going to the arcade every day to play Ganba Legends to get your daily login bonus!
It’s quite popular as well, especially here in Tokyo. I had difficulty finding a machine to use yesterday, since they were often being played by grown men with teams of impossibly flashy cards and boxes of backup cards sitting nearby. I believe you can also fight against opponents teams, so sometimes maybe these guys were playing against each other? Watching them play it’s clear strategy and team-building becomes critical if you want to defeat higher-level opponents.
Two of the machines in Hirose arcade have these boxes attached which let you record screen output to a flash drive! This is probably for the purpose of YouTube videos or something, and it’s an amazing feature I’ve never before seen attached to an arcade game.
This game is fun. The card-collecting feature is addictive, and the idea of slowly building my level and fine-tuning a team to defeat more and harder opponents is appealing. If I lived here, I would absolutely be ‘all in’ on Ganba Legends.