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Free-to-play card game Rage of Bahamut lives among the top-grossing games on the iPhone and Android charts, right up there with Temple Run 2 and Minecraft. Tokyo-based developer Cygames recently revealed that half of its 20 million overall players are playing Bahamut. That would make it one of the most popular games in the world.
That's surprising because it's also a real piece of crap.
"Bahamut's success seems to tell today's game designers that a game with minimal interactivity, massively disorganized UI and incredibly confusing game design is the way to hook millions of players and make a fortune," said Arash Keshmirian, CEO of Limbic Software, in an e-mail.
For one of the most profitable English-language apps of the last year, Rage of Bahamut's interface is shockingly ugly. The fantasy-themed trading card game looks like two Yahoo! Geocities went to war with each other, with text scattered everywhere and dial-up speed load times between every page.
You can even scroll past the top and bottom of the screen, almost as if the entire game is being rendered in some sort of makeshift mobile web browser. Since the game only works if you have a network connection, this may actually be the case.
Once you're actually playing Bahamut, the goal is to level up and get lots of digital cards, each of which features anime artwork of goblins or scantily clad witch ladies. Level up more and get more witch ladies by completing quests and "battling" other players.
Quests consist of, as best as I can tell, little more than poking at static JPEGs of monsters that pop up on the screen. Tap them and they explode into a shower of coins. Actually, you don't even have to tap the monsters for them to explode. Just poke your phone anywhere on the screen like the fat-fingered slob you are, and those troublesome monsters will be crushed by your simulated might. Eventually, text reading "MISSION SUCCESSFUL" pops up on the screen, and lots of little meters fill and you'll probably level up or something.
The section of Bahamut that lets you "battle" other players is unlike the quests, because it doesn't even require input. The game checks both players' stats and then, in a gigantic, glitzy pop-up, informs you whether you won or lost based on those stats. No strategy, no interaction, all automated for the mobile gamer with plenty of time to tap buttons on an app, but no time to use his brains.
Occasionally, Bahamut will ask you to spend money on packs of "RageMedals," which can cost up to $100.
Rage of Bahamut is published in America by Mobage, a mobile gaming service that's also behind Marvel: War of Heroes, which is currently the third most-profitable iOS game in the US. That game is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an exact clone of Rage of Bahamut, but with Marvel-themed artwork.
"Bahamut goes against nearly everything we know," said Keshmirian. "Still, it manages to tap into a huge pocket of gamers few others have been targeting."
"I think card games like Bahamut still have a while to go before they really solidify themselves in the eyes of overseas gamers," Cygames director Yuito Kimura said to Famitsu magazine, as translated by Polygon.
Hopefully it's a long, long while.
