Alteil Chronicle (アルテイルクロニクル)

~ the obituary ~

Coreedge had been operating a browser card game called Alteil for years when it decided to try phones. Alteil Chronicle opened on 15 November 2016, free to play with items for sale, and everybody shortened the name to Arukuro. It shared the setting of the browser game and told a different story inside it, one about a god let out of a seal who goes looking for the reason the world is coming apart.

The marketing phrase Coreedge printed on it translates as something like instant-speed brain battle. In practice the thinking happened before the fight. The studio said openly that it had made the card battle itself fully automatic, partly to suit a phone and partly so that a beginner who had never played a card game could still get through one, and it positioned the player-versus-player colosseum as the main event rather than the story mode, which was where you went to raise characters for the colosseum.

It did better than the shutdown date suggests. Downloads passed four million by 4 October 2019, marked with a campaign that ran to the 15th and handed out a free ten-pull a day. There was a traditional-Chinese edition too, licensed to Cayenne's Ark Mobile as Yaerti Zhanji for the Taiwanese and Hong Kong markets, Macau included. Then 4Gamer carried the closure notice on 31 March 2020, and the service ended at noon on 28 April.

~ the case file ~

~ the battle ran itself ~

A card game where the machine plays the cards is a strange object. The entire pleasure of the form, since Richard Garfield invented the commercial version of it in 1993, is the decision you make with incomplete information at the moment you make it. Take that away and what is left is the deck you brought and the order it happens to come out in, which is closer to a slot machine with homework.

Coreedge said why it did it, and gave two reasons. One was optimizing the thing for a phone. The other was letting a complete beginner sit through a card battle without needing to know what any of the cards did. Its own framing was that it had taken the know-how from running an online trading card game for years and arranged that for a smartphone audience.

This one was never going to reach me. It was a Japanese phone game with a Japanese release window, and by 2016 I was in my thirties and in Ankara, and a gacha card battler in a language I cannot read was not going to end up on my phone no matter how good it was.

~ dex to gamepot to coreedge ~

The franchise beneath this game had been passed around. Alteil.Net, the card game community, started up in November 2006 under Dex Entertainment. In April 2008 the operation went to GP Coreedge, a company Gamepot had just created and funded in full to absorb Dex's entire online game business. The Japanese record counts four operators across the life of Alteil: Dex, then Gamepot, then Gamepot's subsidiary, then Coreedge standing on its own, which is the one that published Chronicle.

~ the end of the alteil line ~

The parent died first. The Flash version of Alteil, the original browser game, closed on 25 October 2018. It came back as a phone app called Alteil NEO, which closed on 29 November 2019. Chronicle closed on 28 April 2020, eighteen months after the first of the three and five months after the second.

The copyright line on the closure notice reads Coreedge Inc and GaYa Corporation. No service has carried the Alteil name since.

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