여신전설 아마조네스 (Amazones)

» see pictosoft.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

It was a one-on-one fighting game wearing a collectable RPG over the top. You attacked and blocked at three heights, you brought a team of three champions into the fight, and the elements went around in a circle the way they do in every Korean game of this period. Around 230 champions, fused and evolved up to five stars, and the evolution worked at a flat hundred percent so the gacha pressure sat on collecting the materials rather than on a roll that could fail you.

What it is actually remembered for is the armor. Hits destroyed your equipment piece by piece while you fought: weapon, shield, helmet, the top of the armor and the bottom of it, each knocked off separately. Underneath was underwear with its own stat bonuses attached, and the underwear could not be destroyed, so the undressing had a floor built into it. Players could also strip their own character at will, which is a feature the publisher's press releases somehow never mentioned and the gaming press noticed immediately.

The art was the expensive part. The producer's pitch was that unlike mobile games where characters turn up in chibi proportions or sketched plainly, here you got console-grade 3D at a size that filled the screen. The surviving launch banner bears him out. It came out on SK Telecom's T Store on 24 June 2014 and it was gone by December.

~ the record ~

~ the cabinet it was aiming at ~

Korean mobile games of 2014 did not usually name their target demographic out loud. This one did. The producer told an interviewer that Amazones was an action RPG aimed at male gamers in their thirties and up who still carried memories of 황금성, the old arcade game where you stripped armor off with a sword. Attacking at three heights while the armor comes apart in pieces is that cabinet's mechanic, rebuilt for a phone. The interview names 황금성 in Korean only and does not date it, so I am not going to put a year on the original here.

The press ran with the obvious angle, describing sexy female warriors and copy about stimulating primal desire, and the development team pushed back on the record in a way that reads almost plaintive. The designer said that was exactly what worried the dev team most, and that he would rather people looked at the strategic element of destroying armor than at the underwear. The producer added that a game is just a game, so please refrain from excessive criticism. They were asking to be reviewed on the fighting system of a product whose entire marketing hook was that the clothes came off.

The age bracket it named out loud is roughly mine. The cabinet it was counting on is not. 황금성 stood in Korean arcades, and the machines I grew up around in Turkey left a different set of reflexes behind, so the one memory this game was built to reach into was a memory I do not have. This is a game that aimed very precisely at a specific memory, which is a good way to find your audience and a bad way to be found by anyone else.

~ four other titles ~

On 4 November 2014 Pictosoft announced that Amazones and four other titles would stop on 3 December. Circus Runaway, Soul Stone for Kakao, Age of Heroes for Kakao and Epic Warrior went with it, the oldest of them two years old and this one five months. By the time that notice ran, new downloads and in-app purchases had already been switched off, so the commercial death had quietly happened before the announcement did.

The stated reason is 내부적인 사정, internal circumstances, which is the standard Korean phrase for declining to name one. The notice says the company had striven to bring customers greater enjoyment, had regrettably made a difficult decision, and would do its best to return with a better service. Refunds went to an email address at pictosoft.com and wanted your bank account number.

This was a catalog being cut, not a company dying. Thirteen months before, Pictosoft had announced a partnership to ship more than twenty games by the first half of 2014, and the December notice is that plan being taken apart. The company kept publishing until at least September 2017 and then stopped leaving traces: no press after that month, pictosoft.co.kr has no DNS at all now, and pictosoft.com answers with a thousand bytes of parking page offering the domain for sale.

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