BlazBlue Alternative: Dark War

~ the obit ~

Arc System Works announced BlazBlue Alternative: Dark War in August 2017 and said Japan would get it in 2018. Japan got it on 16 February 2021. Three and a half years went into that gap, with a studio called Linked Brain doing the building, and the publisher said very little in public about why the date kept moving.

BlazBlue is a fighting game series, and this was not a fighting game. It was an RPG, free to play, with turn-based parties of four, built around chaining combos through a menu instead of through a stick, and it was set during the Dark War itself, the conflict that happens before the main series starts. People who came for the fighters got a prequel they could read. People who came for the RPG got a competent one carrying an unusually heavy script.

On 30 November 2021 Arc System Works announced the end. Sales of 蒼の結晶, the paid crystals, stopped that same day, and it went offline on 31 January 2022 at 13:00 Japan time. Arc System Works gave its reason as being unable to assure the quality of the service going forward, which is the standard Japanese formula for a title that has stopped paying for itself.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the delay ~

Run the arithmetic and it is uncomfortable. From the August 2017 announcement to the February 2021 launch is about forty-two months. From launch to shutdown is about eleven and a half. The wait was roughly three and a half times the life, and the people who pre-registered in 2017 were committing to a trailer four years older than the app they eventually downloaded.

It never left Japan. No English build was ever announced and no global relaunch under some other publisher followed, which for a BlazBlue product is slightly odd given how far the fighting games travel. The series has the kind of following in Turkey that fighting games have here, small and extremely serious, and none of those people could have installed this even if they had wanted to. The pre-registration passed a hundred thousand on 12 February 2021, four days before launch, all of it inside one country.

~ the unfinished story ~

Producer Toshimichi Mori put out a statement alongside the shutdown notice. The first thing he addressed was the scenario, which would not be completed. He said he regretted it, and that he hoped to deliver the rest in some other form someday. As of now there is no other form.

Refunds for unused crystals ran from midnight on 1 February 2022 to 12:59 on 2 May, which is three months of paperwork for a game that had eleven. The players who finished every chapter that shipped are still holding the last one, and the ending exists only as a thing a producer once promised in a press release.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »