Little Noah

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

~ the eulogy ~

Little Noah put a real-time strategy game on a phone. You built up a town and raised units out of it to send at somebody else's. The Android edition arrived on 12 February 2015 and the iOS edition three weeks later on 4 March, both free with an item shop attached.

BlazeGames made it. The studio was a Cygames subsidiary and this was its first title, which is a heavy thing to hang on a debut. Pre-registration had opened on 3 December 2014 and passed two hundred thousand people before the game existed. In November 2015 there was a television commercial with the actress Minami Hamabe in it.

The genre line on the official notice reads リアルタイムストラテジー, real-time strategy, which was an odd label to find on a Japanese free-to-play phone release in 2015. The category had belonged to PC, and the mobile shape of it that was selling at the time was the base-building loop Clash of Clans had standardized. Little Noah sat inside that shape and spent its money on everything above it.

A shutdown notice appeared on 15 November 2018. Service stopped at 14:59 on 17 January 2019, and no cause was printed anywhere that survives.

~ the dossier ~

~ the names in the credits ~

The art director was Akihiko Yoshida, working through CyDesignation. Yoshida had drawn the characters for Final Fantasy XII and for Tactics Ogre before that, so a free phone game about raising units carried the same hand as two of the most looked-at console games of their decade. The music was by Hitoshi Sakimoto, who scored Final Fantasy titles and Valkyria Chronicles.

Those credits are the only part of this game I can place from memory. The work those two are known for came out on consoles that reached Turkey and stayed on shelves for years. Little Noah was an Android release in one country, and I have the whole of it from documents.

~ what the ruby bought ~

Ruby was the paid currency. The refund notice opened the window at 15:00 on 17 January, one minute after the servers went, and closed it at 14:59 on 18 March 2019. Cygames handled the claims out of Shibuya rather than BlazeGames. On 2 April at 18:00 the form link came off the page.

One line in that notice is worth keeping, because it states plainly the thing everyone agrees to and nobody reads: 「リトルノア」の利用権は、サービス終了をもって消滅します. The right to use Little Noah is extinguished at the end of service. Unspent currency came back to you. Spent currency had bought a thing that stopped existing.

There was an English edition called Battle Champs, which reached the stores in 2016 and closed without leaving a date behind. The name returned in 2022 as Little Noah: Scion of Paradise, a paid console game built with Grounding, and that one is still on sale. The phone game left no cause of death and no server behind it; what survived was the word Noah, which Cygames went and sold again as something you buy once.

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