Kimi to Kiri no Labyrinth

» see kimikiri.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A fog comes down over an island school and cuts it off from everywhere else. You wander in and cannot leave. Out of the fog come things called Fogg, and the twelve young men of the student council turn out to be able to fight them, but only properly when you are standing there, because you are what the game calls a Resonance. They address you as Princess. That was the premise Square Enix shipped on 13 July 2017, and it is a tidy piece of design: the romance mechanic and the combat mechanic are the same mechanic.

The thing worth noting is not that Square Enix made a romance game for women. It is how carefully the company's own press release declined to say it was the first one. The wording was that this was Square Enix's first role playing game for a female audience carrying a VR mode, which is a sentence built to be true either way. Denfaminicogamer, writing it up later, dropped the hedge and simply called it the company's first app for women. Some of the content really did work with a headset, which in 2017 was an odd fitting for a dating game and is the detail everyone remembers.

The voice cast was not a budget cast. Yuki Kaji and Takahiro Sakurai were in it, among roughly twenty men whose names sell drama CDs with no game attached. Takeharu Ishimoto, who had scored Crisis Core and The World Ends With You, wrote the music. This was not an experiment Square Enix ran quietly in a corner.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

Pre-registration passed 250,000 and then went over 300,000 by the time the game opened, which is a real number and not a rounding of one. For a new property with no anime behind it and no existing fanbase to inherit, from a publisher with no track record in this market, that is a strong opening position.

~ the day it died ~

The official account posted the notice on 30 March 2018, at a minute past three in the afternoon Tokyo time. The service ran on until 14 June. No reason was given then and none has been given since.

Eleven months is short by any measure, and conspicuously short for Square Enix, a company that has kept far weaker things alive far longer. The app is gone from the Japanese store entirely now; a lookup returns nothing at all, which is the cleanest proof of a delisting there is.

~ what it changed about the audience ~

Three weeks after the notice, Denfaminicogamer ran a piece that used this shutdown and one other to make a point about the shape of these games. A console game you buy has an ending written into it. A game that exists as an operated service does not have one, so the story has no destination until the day the operator announces a closing date, and at that moment the plot has to sprint toward an ending it was never designed to reach.

What the article described next is what I keep coming back to. Women playing these games had worked out a response: buy the CDs, buy the merchandise, keep pulling the gacha, and in some cases buy shares in the publisher, all of it as a way of keeping a fictional person solvent. The article quotes the worry plainly. However much I love this, if it cannot show revenue, the world disappears. Is my favorite app's revenue all right?

~ what replaced it ~

Square Enix went back to this market later and did better at it, and the fog school is not what anyone there would point to now. But the game left something behind it did not intend. It became the worked example in a Japanese argument about what it costs to love a product that has to keep earning, and that argument has outlasted the servers by seven years and counting.

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