Arc the Lad R

» see forwardworks.com/arcthelad as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Arc the Lad R opened on 23 August 2018 for phones and PC, published by ForwardWorks and developed by Alt Plus. ForwardWorks was what Sony did about mobile: a company set up in April 2016, wholly owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment, whose job was to take things out of the PlayStation catalog and put them on telephones. Arc the Lad was a reasonable thing to reach for, a tactical RPG series from the first PlayStation with three mainline entries and a following that had never entirely let go.

The original games had actually traveled. Working Designs brought the trilogy to North America in 2002 in a collector's box that is still the reason the name registers in English at all. The phone revival stayed in Japan for its whole life. An English edition had been announced through the Taiwanese publisher Boltrend, but the Japanese service reached its own closing date while that one still had no release day, so the only Arc the Lad R anybody actually played was the Japanese one.

ForwardWorks said on 26 April 2021 that it would close the game on 30 June. Sales of the paid currency and the gacha pots stopped at 15:00 the same afternoon. The main scenario was not finished, and the company admitted as much in the closure notice itself, describing chapter six as still in production and promising to carry it to an ending before the two months ran out.

Attached to the funeral notice was a present. Every player got a ticket guaranteeing a five-star Galahad, a new character distributed free in the same notice that set the date for the servers coming down. Paid sales had stopped that afternoon, so the character was the one thing in the announcement nobody could have bought.

~ the chronicle ~

~ four hours early ~

The official account posted the closure on 26 April with a time in it: 30 June 2021, Wednesday, 15:00. That number went everywhere. 4Gamer ran it the same evening and the English-language sites picked it up from there, which is why 15:00 is still the time most references give.

The same account posted again on the morning of 30 June. The verb had shifted into the past tense and so had the clock: the service ended at 11:00. Four hours had come off the end of the game's life between April and June. Players documenting the last day said the change had never been posted to the official feed or the website, and the closing message is where most of them learned the new time. What did get sent out properly was a farewell video from Mizuha, and a refund window for unused paid stones that stayed open until 30 September.

~ the publisher went too ~

ForwardWorks outlasted the game by about three years and then stopped being a company. Its domain still resolves, and a request to forwardworks.com now ends up on the Aniplex homepage, the subsidiary having been absorbed in 2024. Sony's attempt at a mobile division worked through a handful of titles from the back catalog and closed most of them. What it left on the open internet is a hostname that answers in somebody else's name.

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