Idola Phantasy Star Saga

~ the obituary ~

Phantasy Star turned thirty and Sega marked it with a game you could only reach through a Japanese phone store account. イドラ ファンタシースターサーガ launched on 27 November 2018 as the series' anniversary title and never left Japan. A franchise that had put science fiction RPGs on 8-bit Sega hardware in the 1980s got its birthday present in the shape of a free-to-play command RPG for phones.

The hook was in the label it gave itself, a 運命選択RPG, a destiny-choice RPG. Characters belonged to Law or to Chaos, and once you cleared a character's personal story you could push them across to the other side or into Neutral, which rewrote what they did in a fight.

The other idea was the better one. In Idola Battle you could go and fight the enormous monster the game is named after, or you could become it and go hunting other players.

~ the case file ~

~ the birthday present ~

It leaned on Phantasy Star Online 2 at every level. A SEGA ID tied the two accounts together, so time spent here earned Idola Points you could spend on items over there. The races mapped one for one onto PSO2's, and by the sixth chapter of Episode 2 the game had confirmed outright that its godfolk were ARKS.

Popona, a character from inside the game, was launched as its promotional virtual YouTuber on 14 November 2018. The game she was promoting did not exist yet and would not for another thirteen days.

~ passed down the chain ~

Episode 2 arrived on 21 May 2020 with a war between the Leoria Empire and the Canseed Principality. On 1 February 2021 Sega handed day-to-day operation to Apsy, the studio that had been co-developing it all along, and kept the publisher credit for itself. That is eleven months before the end.

The shutdown notice went up at the end of October 2021.

~ what got smaller ~

The destiny system is where you can watch a budget contract in real time. At launch, moving a character between Law and Chaos changed their battle model and the staging of their Elemental Blast. From Episode 2 onward, with the app's download size a problem, it changed only the standing portrait and the voice, so a character could keep a Law face while saying distinctly Chaos things.

Service ended at noon on 12 January 2022, three years and forty-six days after it began, with the refund window opening five hours later. Popona's channel had finished broadcasting and the official web comic had ended before the announcement even came. The mascot goes quiet first.

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