Fortune Tellers Academy

~ the obituary ~

Hitoshi Fujisawa had directed Dragon Quest. What he built next, with Digital Works Entertainment and published by Square Enix, was a game about guessing the news. It opened on 15 February 2016 on iOS and Android, free, after a press preview in January and a launch window that slipped by a few weeks.

The wrapper was an anime one. You were a student at an academy, the characters were drawn by Hagu Koshijima of Biblia Koshodo, the major arcana came from PALOW, and Sarah Àlainn sang the theme. The story ran in novel chapters, with the eleventh arriving on 1 December 2016. Square Enix called the genre a リアル連動ゲーム, a game linked to the real thing.

On 1 November 2017 Square Enix handed the running of it to Digital Works Entertainment, citing steadier story releases and cheaper operation. Fujisawa kept writing. Six months later, on 27 April 2018 at one in the afternoon, the closure notice went up and the paid currency stopped selling in the same minute.

~ the case file ~

~ the questions ~

A question had eight choices and asked about something five days to a week away. Four or so went up each day across eight categories, from politics and the economy through to food and sport, and they were written by the people who write questions for television quiz shows. Because every one of them was a question about Japan's week, the game was only legible from inside that news cycle; there was no version of it you could play from anywhere else.

Choosing cost ten points of a stamina meter that capped at forty, so you could spread yourself across several answers on the same question, and most people did. You also staked in-game gold. Each choice carried a multiplier that worked like a horse-racing board: the more players piled onto an answer, the less it paid. Getting it right returned your gold times the multiplier, plus experience.

~ the odds ~

Against the hedging there was one honest instrument. You could put a 自信あり flag, a declaration of confidence, on exactly one choice per question, and Fujisawa treated that single mark as the only real measurement of foresight the game produced. He gave one example in an interview: a player who had got more than twenty of those confident calls right out of the first forty questions.

~ what the crowd knew ~

The official site ran a section called 東方見聞録 that published the aggregate for every past question: the hit rate, plus a breakdown by age and gender of who had picked what. Fujisawa said its page views were very high, which tracks. The numbers were the one thing in the game nobody could gacha their way to.

Only once was the crowd's verdict treated as a forecast rather than a scoreboard. A Phantasy Star Online 2 collaboration ran a 一番人気チャレンジ, a most-popular-answer challenge, where everyone in both games got a bonus if the choice the crowd had piled onto turned out to be the right one. Beyond that promotion, nobody published what the players collectively thought was going to happen.

~ what the gallery kept ~

The notice gave a reason, which not all of them do: core staff had left after the handover, and without them the team could not hold the operation together well enough to keep the service worth paying for. It does not mention revenue. Famitsu noted that the same day's other news was Fujisawa announcing his departure from Square Enix, and that he had left the story unfinished and wanted to make a sequel one day. The final maintenance on 29 June shipped version 3.2.0, which added an offline gallery so players could keep reading the story and looking at their cards, provided they downloaded the data before the last day of July. The domain the whole thing lived on is a casino blog now.

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