まほうつかいの箱

~ the last words ~

TYPE-MOON is the studio behind Tsukihime and the Fate games, and in January 2009 it opened a site for Japanese feature phones. The soft launch on 26 January wrote the name in kanji as 魔法使いの箱. The full opening on 20 April rewrote it in hiragana and gave it a conceit: the site was not a site, it was アーネンエルベ, the coffee shop that appears inside Kara no Kyoukai and Tsukihime, and you were a customer sitting in it.

Membership cost 315 yen a month. That bought 300 points, and points bought wallpapers, ringtones, standby Flash animations and photo frames, which is what every Japanese mobile subscription site sold in 2009. A second currency called TM points accrued at one a day for turning up at all, and spent on things the paid points could not reach.

What it had that the others did not was fiction. Two waitresses were written to work the counter, Katsuragi Chikagi and Hibino Hibiki, and they began as an interface. They introduced the downloads and ran the reader mail column. Within a couple of years they were characters in their own right, turning up beside the cast of games they had never been in.

Japanese fandom billed through a Japanese carrier is about as far from my side of the internet as a paid website gets. In 2009 I was a computer engineer in Ankara and the visual novel scene reached me only as a genre name I had seen and never investigated. The part I can judge is the mechanism: a monthly fee collected by the phone company, for a website read on a screen smaller than a credit card.

~ the record ~

~ the two waitresses ~

Chikagi and Hibiki were TYPE-MOON's own inventions, so the studio could do whatever it wanted with them, and it did. 大森林 drew a four-panel strip called ひびちかタイム that ran in Monthly Comptiq from the October 2010 issue to the June 2013 one and was collected as a single volume on 26 June 2013. Frontier Works put out a drama CD series, スターリット・マーマレード, treated as canon rather than as merchandise, and Comp Ace ran a manga version of it.

The furthest they got was animation. At TYPE-MOON Fes in July 2012 a special episode of Carnival Phantasm was screened with the two of them as leads, which put characters originally created to explain a download menu into the studio's own crossover anime.

~ the daily churn ~

Most of what it published was small and frequent. A four-panel comic went up every two weeks and a staff diary appeared at no particular interval. COFFEE BREAK was a short story told as a conversation between character icons, and the fortune reading changed every other day, handing out a lucky color and a wallpaper to go with it.

The recurring feature that says the most about the audience is ALL RANKING TYPE-MOON, a themed vote run on the studio's own characters. One round asked for the best character to be stranded on a desert island with, another for the one you would most want to receive chocolate from. A paid membership site running polls this specific only works if everyone paying already knows every name on the ballot.

~ closing time ~

The site stopped at 4pm on 30 April 2014. Japanese feature phone content was finishing generally by then, and the reason is structural: a 315 yen site worked because the carrier collected the money in the phone bill, and on smartphones the carrier was no longer the one billing you.

TYPE-MOON did not treat the contents as disposable. The illustrations that had been sold a wallpaper at a time were collected and printed as a hardback, まほ箱クロニクル, on 15 August 2014 under the studio's own books imprint. There is still a page for the site on typemoon.com, written in the past tense, describing the official mobile site that closed in 2014.

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