Argonavis from BanG Dream! AAside

» see aaside.bushimo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Argonavis from BanG Dream! AAside ended service on 31 January 2022 at 14:59 Japan time. The official account posted the confirmation one minute later, at exactly three o'clock, which is the kind of punctuality Japanese operators bring to this. The game had been running for 382 days.

It was a rhythm and adventure game for phones, free with purchases attached, built by DeNA for Bushiroad. The setup was a spin-off: BanG Dream! had spent years on girls' bands, and AAside was the boys' version, five bands whose voice actors also played the instruments and toured as those bands in real venues. Three hundred thousand people registered for it before it opened.

Nobody outside Japan was the audience here, and I want to be plain that I am reading this one rather than remembering it. The game shipped in Japanese to a store region I have never had an account in, and its whole purpose was to sell tickets to concerts in Tokyo. What survives of it for me is a 1920 by 1080 press image with five characters on it and the words "pre-registration now open" along the bottom.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four hundred and thirty-six days in line ~

Pre-registration opened on 5 November 2019. Ten thousand registrations came in before the first day was out. On 14 December 2020, thirteen months later, Bushiroad announced the count had passed three hundred thousand. The game came out on 14 January 2021, which is 436 days after the queue opened.

It then ran for 382. The reservation period outlasted the product by 54 days, so the people who had been waiting since late 2019 got slightly less game than they had spent queuing for it.

~ the company they built for it ~

Bushiroad gave notice on 22 November 2021 at 15:01, seventy days ahead, apologizing in the same breath for how abrupt it was. Most of the diamond packs came off sale that same afternoon, with one left available; the rest of the store closed on 16 December. Paid currency was refundable afterward through a button on the app's own notice screen.

What happened next is the strange part. The day after the shutdown was announced, the project held a live show and used it to declare independence, dropping BanG Dream! from its name to become simply "from ARGONAVIS". Two months later, in February 2022, Bushiroad incorporated a dedicated company for the property, with its own books.

Then it tried again. A second game, Kimisute, launched on 7 February 2024 and ended on 30 November that year, at 14:59. The same official account announced both deaths; by then it had been renamed, so the post mourning the first game now sits under the handle of the second one.

~ the album nobody could play ~

Forty-three original songs were written for a game that lasted a year, and on 12 April 2023, fourteen months after the servers went off, they were pressed as a limited memorial album. On 7 October 2024 Bushiroad announced that the whole project was going on indefinite hiatus, and the notice said why: with the app game that forms the core of a character franchise gone, continuing on live shows alone was not workable at this stage. It took them two years and eight months to write that down.

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