Imperial SaGa Eclipse

» see www.eclipse.imperialsaga.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Imperial SaGa Eclipse required nothing to be installed, which should have put it within reach of anyone, and it was still shut to me completely. It ran in a browser tab, the one place I really do live, but that tab had to be opened from a Yahoo! Japan or DMM account and everything inside it was in Japanese. The barrier was not the hardware for once.

It ended on 26 December 2024 at 11:00 Japan time. Square Enix published the notice on 30 May that year, seven months ahead, in the flat register those notices always use.

The game was a free browser RPG in the SaGa series, built by a studio called Think and Feel and overseen by Akitoshi Kawazu, who has run SaGa since the Game Boy. Kenji Ito wrote the music. It was the third entry in a line of SaGa social games that started on GREE in 2012, and it was the last.

Square Enix had already killed this game once, under a different name, and then ran the second funeral to exactly the same schedule.

~ the dossier ~

~ what killed the first one ~

Imperial SaGa, the direct predecessor, launched on 18 June 2015 and was built in Adobe Flash. Adobe announced Flash's retirement, and on 25 March 2019 Square Enix gave the game its death notice. It went off on 26 December 2019 at 11:00.

That same March notice carried a promise: a replacement was coming, provisionally titled New Imperial SaGa, and it would be HTML5. Secondary write-ups have since garbled this into a successor announced on Eclipse's death day in 2024. It is the other way around. "New Imperial SaGa" was Eclipse's own working title, announced alongside the first game's funeral, and it existed so that a browser plugin could never strand the series again.

~ eight weeks of overlap ~

Eclipse opened on 31 October 2019 while Imperial SaGa was still running, and the two services operated side by side for eight weeks before the older one closed. It had a separate domain and a closed beta in July, with a pre-registration campaign running from September. The systems were rebuilt rather than carried across. The LP mechanic was dropped and health recovery added, and the Japanese write-up says the changes run through nearly the whole game.

~ the dates repeat ~

Here is the schedule Square Enix ran twice. Paid Crown sales halted on 27 June in both years. The service ended on 26 December at 11:00 in both years. The only stage that moved was the announcement itself, which came on 25 March in 2019 and on 30 May in 2024.

So two of the three stages land on identical dates five years apart, down to the hour of death. The ports went first, with the Niconico and d Game versions retired on 27 September 2023 when those platforms closed around them, their players migrated back to the Yahoo! build.

The difference is what came after. In 2019 the notice said a successor was in development; in 2024 it said nothing of the kind, and Siliconera read it correctly as the end of the whole sub-series. What Square Enix did leave behind is a site called Imperial Saga eclipse ARCHIVE, a story reader that is still answering today while the game's own domain has stopped resolving. The fix for Flash worked. It bought five years.

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