Hortensia Saga

» see app.hortensia-saga.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Hortensia Saga opened on 22 April 2015 on iOS and Android, a fantasy role-playing game carrying the subtitle 蒼の騎士団, the blue knights. The game was built by f4samurai and published by Sega Games, the standard arrangement of that moment: a specialist mobile studio doing the work, a famous name on the storefront.

On 1 November 2020 the arrangement ended and f4samurai took over running the game itself. The property got a twelve-episode television anime in early 2021, and that anime got an English dub, which is as close as any of this came to leaving Japan. The game never had an English service at all, so the cartoon about the knights was localized and the knights were not.

The closing schedule was published on 31 March 2022 and ran two months. Sales of the paid currency stopped that same day at 14:59. A last tournament ran from 25 April to 1 May, and an epilogue was added to the story after maintenance on 20 May. The service itself ended on 31 May at 14:59, with the refund window opening one minute later and staying open until 30 July.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the same notice twice ~

The reason f4samurai gave is a single sentence that says almost nothing while sounding careful: having been supported by users for about seven years, it had concluded that continuing to operate while maintaining the quality of the service was difficult under present conditions. The same notice contained a promise. 『オルタンシア・サーガR』に関しては、引き続きサービスをご提供させていただきます, as for Hortensia Saga R, we will continue to provide the service.

R was a full remake that had launched in February 2021, so for over a year the studio ran the original and its replacement side by side. On 30 September 2022, four months after the original closed, f4samurai announced that R would close too, and published the same sentence a second time with 約7年間 swapped for 約1年と半年. R stopped on 30 November 2022.

Taking a game back from its publisher usually reads as a rescue, and this one lasted nineteen months from handover to shutdown. The remake the notice told players to move to survived the game it replaced by six months.

~ the site that never got the message ~

The site at app.hortensia-saga.com still returns a page today. It is frozen in 2020, on the announcement that operation was transferring from Sega to f4samurai, and it still carries banners for the anime and for R. Sega's own host at horsaga.sega-net.com still redirects visitors to it. Nothing anywhere on that page mentions that either game closed.

So the last word the operator left in public is a handover notice for a service that ended two years later, pointing at a remake that ended six months after that. A frozen site is an accurate record of the moment somebody stopped updating it, and this one stopped at the exact moment the people who cared took the work back.

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