Kemono Friends (mobile game)

» see sp.nexon.co.jp/kemo/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Kemono Friends started as a mobile game, which is worth saying first because almost nobody who knows the name now encountered it that way. Nexon opened pre-registration on 16 February 2015 and shipped the Android version on 16 March, with iOS following on 19 March. It was billed as a new kind of zoo RPG, built on the premise that animals at a Japan-sized safari park have become girls with the traits of their species, and the player wanders the park befriending them. More than 50,000 people pre-registered, every character was fully voiced, and the project had a manga running in Shonen Ace alongside it.

It did not work. The game was a fairly conventional free-to-play collection RPG at a moment when the Japanese mobile market was saturated with fairly conventional free-to-play collection RPGs, and the setting that would later carry the brand was not enough on its own to move revenue. Nexon ran it for a year and nine months and then ended service on 14 December 2016. By the standards of Japanese mobile closures this was unremarkable. Dozens of titles ended that year on the same terms, and the announcement attracted roughly the attention such announcements attract.

The anime premiered on 11 January 2017, twenty-eight days later.

It had been produced on a very small budget with early CG that was widely mocked in its first week, and it then became the television event of the season in Japan. Discussion volume on Japanese social media went vertical, the opening theme charted, the manga and merchandise sold, and Japari Park became a national reference. Visitor numbers rose at real zoos for animals featured in the show. The franchise that the game had been built to launch became enormous, and the game was already gone.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the audience found instead ~

A substantial number of people watched the anime, went looking for the original game, and discovered it had closed a month before they heard of any of it. Nexon said at first that there were no plans to restart the service, and later softened that to the position that a restart was theoretically possible without ever committing to one. No restart happened. The brand went on without its first product: new games were eventually made under the Kemono Friends name by other hands, and none of them is the 2015 Nexon app.

~ the timing ~

Service decisions for a game like this are made months before they take effect. The call to close in December was almost certainly taken in the autumn, while the anime was in post-production and before anyone had any evidence it would do anything at all. Nobody at Nexon was working from the information that arrived in January, because in the autumn it did not exist yet. The failure was not of judgment, and that is the uncomfortable part of this one.

~ the distance ~

This never left Japan. There was no English release, no Western storefront listing, and the manga and the voice cast and the park premise all pointed at a domestic audience. The anime eventually traveled through streaming and subtitles, which is how most people outside Japan met the property at all, and by then the game had been dead for months. Turkey in 2016 was not receiving Japanese mobile zoo RPGs in any form, and I only know this story at all because the shape of it, the thing dying immediately before the thing succeeding, is unusual enough to have been written up in English after the fact.

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