Guruguru Shoukan Magical Gear

» see magical-gear.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Guruguru Shoukan Magical Gear got an official website on 1 December 2015, back when GCREST was the company behind it. Closed beta testers were recruited on 6 January 2016 and again on the 19th. A giveaway ran on into February, and on the 9th the application window for it was extended. Then the news column on the site stopped.

It started again on 20 October 2016, with an item headed "important notice: notice of transfer." GREE had taken the game off GCREST as a business transfer, and the same day GREE's wholly owned subsidiary Funplex announced it was moving into the business of running smartphone game apps, with this as the first title on the list. Pre-registration opened that afternoon and went past 120,000 sign-ups inside a day.

The game opened on 22 November 2016 for iOS and Android, eleven months and three weeks after its own website had gone up, with pre-registration finishing above 240,000. You collected units drawn from six races and fought with a party of six, lifting a unit's level ceiling ten at a time through a system called limit break. It ran for 295 days.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the eight month silence ~

Between 9 February and 20 October 2016 the official site published nothing at all. GCREST had run a game through two rounds of closed beta and then gone quiet in public for eight months. Nothing GCREST or GREE ever published explains the gap. The only event anyone can place inside it is the sale.

~ what the transfer notice was for ~

A notice of transfer is normally written for people who already hold an account, telling them whose terms they are under now and what happens to the money they have already spent. This one went up on a game that had never opened its doors. It was not addressed to players, because there were none. It was addressed to a beta list and to whoever had kept the site bookmarked for ten months.

Reaching it from here was never really on. The whole thing sat behind a Japanese store region, with a Japanese payment layer and two Japanese voice actors doing the marketing, and the version of this game that existed for anyone outside Japan was a 4Gamer page written in a language I need help with. The research for this entry is a translation of a translation.

~ eight hundred thousand downloads ~

Five hundred thousand downloads in the first week, reported on 2 December 2016. Eight hundred thousand by the 15th. On 31 January 2017 it ran a crossover with the Fullmetal Alchemist anime, which is not a license a quiet title normally gets, and on 14 February it published a long interview with Yui Ogura, one of the two voice actors carrying the campaign. The notice that it was closing went up on 15 June.

That leaves just under seven months between opening day and the decision to stop. The servers ran another ninety days and switched off on 13 September 2017. For years afterward the site stayed up with that notice pinned to the top of its news column, sitting directly above the beta recruitment posts from January 2016. magical-gear.com now answers with a server error.

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