Promotion for a Tokimemo event in Battle Cats with the subtitle: "Win her heart before graduation!"

she was too busy working full time in bombergirl to make a proper appearance, maybe, which is a shame because we need a cerebral tokimemo collab that only battle cats is capable of delivering. bye bye, all of the cats…

battle cats is weirdly successful. it announced 80 million downloads this year and claimed 50 million players three years ago. I would say it feels like no one talks about it except there are multiple youtubers that seem to have made careers out of playing battle cats. this a recent revelation for me, but before PONOS committed themselves to supporting a service game, they actually worked on PS1 games and had decent success in the mobile space with their mr series featuring stubby stick figures, which actually seems to be a detail they continue to slip in to battle cats as enemy characters. the BGM from mr aahh is still lodged deep in a part of my brain typically reserved for yosuke yasui tracks.

the cats are also very obviously mona-inspired, which has only made the success of battle cats even more confusing to me considering the very messy history of mona characters. I’ll probably want to say more about this in the future, but back well before the yukkuris had the threat of trademark looming over them, avex had once filed to trademark mona lookalikes that were popularized by a flash video that went truly viral on the japanese web of 2005. the original flash creator was bought out, and this video appeared on newly pressed CD singles that featured these characters on the jacket art to better ride that wave. 2ch was, to put it politely, frothingly furious about this, because mona were always considered a truly communal mascot that couldn’t be owned by anyone. one poster feeding into the drama claimed he was going to burn down the avex CEO’s house and assault his wife with acid. another claimed he was going to murder an avex employee. at least the latter eventually cried to a judge, but avex at this point had essentially no choice but to stand down and abandoned registering the trademark, recalled any CDs from stores, and said they would not collect any royalties on already contracted goods. battle cats had a buffer of about a decade before it released, and I struggle to find people old enough to forge this comparison, but it is interesting to me that the internet hate machine seemingly passed it over. battle cats is an even more direct lift of mona culture since it twists a base design into different character varieties! the titan cat looks like a mimic of the hattoushin mona, and that guy has his own wikipedia article.