Grimms Echoes

» see jp.square-enix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Grimms Echoes went live on iOS and Android on 28 March 2019, with more than half a million advance downloads behind it. It had been announced under a working title, Project-Echoes, and came out of the same Square Enix line as Grimms Notes, the studio's earlier fairy-tale RPG. It was not a sequel to that game. It was a separate story in the same world, with its own cast and a field-walk structure the first game did not use.

The premise did what the series name promises: the Brothers Grimm canon pulled apart and reassembled, with the people inside the stories aware that their stories have shapes. For two and a bit years it ran next to its own sibling, Grimms Notes Repage, the two of them occasionally sharing a live broadcast.

Square Enix put out the notice on 30 June 2021. Service would stop at 13:00 on 31 August, two months and a day later.

This is a phone RPG that existed in Japanese for a Japanese audience and never looked for anything else, which is the usual arrangement and the reason most people reading this have never seen a screenshot of it. Its whole public life happened in a market I was not standing in.

~ the case file ~

~ an ending on purpose ~

The interesting part is the reason given. The producer's line was that the game was finishing its story rather than being cut off, and the schedule supports him: the second part's closing chapter shipped on 30 July 2021, a month before the servers stopped. Players got the end of the thing they had been reading.

Service games almost never get that. The ordinary mobile shutdown arrives mid-arc, with a last event hastily rewritten into a farewell and a plot that stops rather than concludes. Square Enix spent its final month publishing an ending instead, and then stopped the service on the date it had given.

~ what the store still has ~

The game's own pages under the Square Enix domain are gone, answering 404 now. The app is not. Version 1.4.9 of Grimms Echoes is still listed on the Japanese App Store, free to download, published by Square Enix Co., Ltd.

The timestamp on that build is the detail worth keeping. Apple records it as 31 August 2021 at 09:49 UTC, which is 18:49 in Tokyo, just under six hours after the service it connected to had stopped. Somebody shipped a final version of a client that no longer had a server, that evening, and then left it there. Five years on it remains downloadable, and good for nothing except proving the game existed.

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