A couple of years ago, I posted about Ring ☆ Dream (リング☆ドリーム 女子プロレス大戦), a rather mindless browser game from Success Corp that I was playing at the time. I used to play it avidly every day, but dropped it and switched to very intermittent play after they disappointed me. I’ll explain more about that incident later, but first let’s talk about the game shutting down. Apparently the announcement was made on December 19, 2019, almost 7 years to the date Ring ☆ Dream launched (Dec 20, 2012).

I completely missed the announcement, firstly because I’m not the kind of person who reads announcements and secondly because I wasn’t playing at the time. I only dropped in on Jan 1st to see what free New Years’ goodies I could score, then I felt nostalgic so I stuck around for a while. It was only after the New Years’ event was over that I sensed something was wrong.

Ring ☆ Dream made its money by releasing new character cards almost every week so that players could gacha or grind to gain an advantage in the latest event. But no new cards came out after the usual New Year trio, not even on Valentine’s Day. Once I realized that, I was just waiting for the end to be announced, not knowing it had already been announced without my knowledge.

I might still be waiting even now if I hadn’t glanced down and noticed this message that went out on March 12th:

It’s the usual “Thank you for playing, best of luck” message, saying service will end for good on the 26th of March. The final event has also been giving out regular and premium gacha tickets like crazy, and the long lead time to shutdown is more than enough to time for fans to take screenshots and try to pull the characters they’ve always wanted.

As for why Ring ☆ Dream is going down, nobody is saying anything officially. 4gamer speculates that it might be due to Adobe ending support for Flash, and by extension Flash games, by the end of 2020. The timing right before the end of the Japanese fiscal year might also be Success Corp cleaning up unprofitable loose ends so it can start the next quarter on a fresh note. The game was so generous with the free gacha tickets that I don’t think it made a lot of money.

I don’t really mind whatever the reason is. It’s not a game I was playing all that regularly, and I never spent any money on it. Plus 7 years is a really good run for such a simple game, especially when you consider that some mobile games barely last a year before folding. If there’s anything I will miss, it will be the simplicity of the experience and a few of the characters like Mary Norton, Kobayakawa Pohi, Hoshizora Kogane, Spider Kikuchi and my very favorite, Takizawa Izumi.

In a game filled with ridiculous gimmicks and outrageous outfits, a serious character who was like, “Look, I just want to wrestle and wrestle well,” really endeared herself to me.

Apart from that, normally I would have missed the story-telling, but that’s what disappointed me and made me drop out of being a regular player, so I won’t miss it. The gimmick of Ring ☆ Dream was that the story would develop on the fly according to fan reaction. The outcome of championship and other matches all depended on fan votes. You picked which character to support and the character with the greater number of battle points (earned by supporting players) won the battle and changed the outcome of the story. It’s like if Wrestlemania operated purely on fan votes instead backstage decisions.

Unfortunately, something happened to change my faith in the legitimacy of this process. I don’t remember the year (2016? 17?) but Spider Kikuchi had a year-end title defence. After steam-rolling all her enemies for months, suddenly all the writing started to hint heavily that she was going to lose. And lose she did, and by a landslide too. After handily beating all her competition that year, suddenly the fans didn’t like her any more? IIRC her enemy was Yuki-onna who is really popular, but even so she shouldn’t have lost so badly. And what was with all the foreshadowing? Hmmmmmmm… 🤨

Once that seed of doubt took root, it rapidly sapped my motivation to follow the story and support the characters. What’s the point of getting so heavily invested if the writers are just going to push who they want anyway? Of course I have zero proof that any shenanigans went on. Maybe the fans were tired of Kikuchi, maybe Yuki is just that popular. But the timing, the mood, the result, it was really fishy… and once trust is lost, it’s next to impossible to get it back. It’s not like the game had much else to offer anyway, so that was effectively the end for me and Ring ☆ Dream.

Having said all that, I am a little bit sorry to see the game go. Like the late Paradise Bay, it was a very simple, relaxing, no pressure game that you could check into every once in a while. And that same laid back nature probably led to its demise. Welp, it had a good run, and it was fun while it lasted. Farewell, Ring ☆ Dream! On to new experiences!