Dragalia Lost

» see dragalialost.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Everything Nintendo had put on a phone before this arrived wearing something you already recognized, a Mii or a plumber. Dragalia Lost had to invent its own world and then talk people into caring about it, which is a much harder job on a platform where the competition is free and endless. It launched on 27 September 2018 in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and the United States, and picked up six more countries on 26 January 2019. Eleven markets was where the list stopped.

Cygames wrote the game and Nintendo published it, which is close to the reverse of how Nintendo normally operates. Cygames knew the machinery of the Japanese mobile market cold, the daily login and the limited-time summoning banner. What Nintendo brought was a willingness to spend four years on a story that ran past six hundred thousand words in the original Japanese, most of which nobody buying a summon was ever going to read. The action was real action too, four players in a dungeon in real time, with every character able to turn into a dragon for a few seconds of enormous damage.

I could not have installed it. Turkey was never on the list, and it was never on the list for most of continental Europe either, so the entire audience for this game was a set of app stores I do not have an account in. That makes this a grave written from the outside about a thing that stayed regional for its whole life, which is not the usual shape for a Nintendo product.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

The business model was the standard one and the game did not pretend otherwise. You spent an in-app currency called Diamantium on summons, and the summons gave you characters and dragons out of a weighted pool. What sat on top of that was unusually generous with its content, the crossover events especially. Fire Emblem Heroes characters came through, and so did Mega Man and later the cast of Persona 5 Strikers, which meant the game kept borrowing recognition it could not generate on its own.

It got a nomination for portable game of the year at the D.I.C.E. Awards and a Metacritic score in the high sixties, which is roughly the right summary. Better than it needed to be, not good enough to become the thing Nintendo needed on phones.

~ the day it died ~

The wind-down came in two announcements. In March 2022 Nintendo said the game would end service sometime that year and told everyone when the last story chapter would land, without giving a date for the ending itself. The main campaign finished in July 2022 with the second half of chapter 26, so the story got a real conclusion rather than being cut off, which is more than most of these get.

On 30 August the date arrived. Diamantium came off sale almost immediately, the remaining packs stopped selling on 30 October, and the servers went dark on 30 November 2022 at 06:00 UTC. Every quest start and every resource spend had gone through a server, so there was nothing left in the app afterward to run. Open it now and you get a notice telling you the service ended, with no way past it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Six hundred thousand words of writing went with the servers. There is no offline build and no single-player mode left behind for the people who had paid for four years of characters. Whatever was written into that game is now reachable only through wikis and other people's video captures.

This was Nintendo's own idea, the only mobile property they built from scratch instead of renting from their back catalog. When it stopped earning enough, it turned out to be exactly as disposable as everyone else's. The Mario and Fire Emblem apps were still running when this one closed.

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