BATON=RELAY

~ the obituary ~

BATON=RELAY asked you to be a voice director. Not a producer and not a manager: a director, handing roles to sixteen young voice actresses and steering what their careers became. The premise needs a country where voice acting runs as a star system with a fan economy bolted to it, which Japan has and which has no real equivalent anywhere I have lived. The game was never going to travel, and nobody involved appears to have expected it to.

The project opened in August 2019 under the name 新世代声優ヒロインプロジェクト, a new-generation voice heroine project, and its selling point was that all sixteen cast members were newcomers. i-tron brought in Tamiki Wakagi, who created The World God Only Knows, to design the characters, and Yosuke Kabashima, chief animation director on Symphogear, to handle the animation. An official comic ran in installments through the months before launch, reaching its thirteenth chapter three days before the app existed.

Registrations passed 350,000 by 16 March 2020. The iOS build shipped on 22 March with Android close behind, a live special went out on the 24th with Tomori Kusunoki guesting, and the first television commercial started running on TOKYO MX and BS11 from 25 April. For a studio nobody outside Japan had heard of, that is a lot of money moving in one direction.

i-tron announced the end on 30 June 2020. The game closed on 30 July at 15:00, a hundred and thirty days after it opened.

~ the case file ~

~ who built it ~

i-tron is the obscure part of this. It was not a famous studio and it did not become one, and BATON=RELAY is what it is remembered for, in the narrow circles that remember it at all. The company spent seven months on a public build-up before releasing anything, which is a long pre-launch for a small publisher and tells you where the budget went.

The sixteen-newcomers decision was the whole bet. Established voice actresses come with audiences attached, so casting unknowns means the game has to generate the fame itself before it can sell it back to you. That works when the game lasts long enough for someone to become a favorite. This one did not get a second season of anything.

~ the final month ~

A mini album had come out on 17 June. On 29 June, i-tron announced an internet signing event for the second CD release, scheduled for 7 and 8 July. The shutdown notice went out the following day, 30 June, and the signing event happened on schedule a week after that, with the cast meeting fans online to promote music from a game that had three weeks to live. Somebody had to decide whether to cancel it and decided not to, and on the evidence that was the right call, because the CDs still play.

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