Ore Tower -Over Legend Endless Tower-

» see ole-tower.marv.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Tools are girls. That was the premise, stated without embarrassment. You played an apprentice foreman building a magic tower, and the things you raised and sent into battle were 建姫, hand tools and heavy machinery given personalities and a voice actress each. One of them was a pair of radio pliers. Another was a submersible pump. The official genre line translated to something like a laid-back and also intense tower construction role-playing game, which tells you the tone better than any summary of the plot would.

It opened on DMM's browser game service at noon on 2 September 2014. Marvelous produced it while the development and the day-to-day operation sat with a company called SE Mobile and Online. DMM.com Labo ran the service itself, and all three names went on the copyright line. The voice cast was unusually strong for a browser game of that size, deep enough that a printed character guide came out in March 2015, and the game ran character popularity votes the way these things did.

Then on 1 April 2017 the operator posted that it was ending. The date did what you would expect, so the staff had to follow up with a clarification that translates as: truly, it is regrettable, but this is not an April Fool. The service closed at 13:00 on 1 May, two years and eight months after it opened.

None of this was ever reachable from outside Japan. DMM's games platform was a closed Japanese storefront that wanted a Japanese phone number and a Japanese payment method, so for most of the world this entire catalogue existed as screenshots. Ore Tower is one of a few thousand games that were never withheld from me so much as never offered.

~ the dossier ~

~ a week of overlap ~

The replacement was called 毎日こつこつ俺タワー, roughly Daily Diligent Ore Tower, and it was a phone app rather than a browser game. It launched on 24 April 2017. That is three weeks after the closure of the original was announced and seven days before the original actually stopped, so for one week in late April both versions were live at once.

No data migration was offered, and nothing in the coverage or the fan wiki describes one. Whatever you had built across those two years and eight months stayed in the browser. Marvelous is not named on the app at all, which makes the successor look less like a sequel than like the development studio keeping the parts it owned and walking out with them.

~ the pliers and the pump ~

On 2 June 2020 the operator of the app posted something on Twitter that almost no live game has ever had to post. It was looking for the illustrators of three of its own characters. The images were attached so that people could identify their own work.

The explanation was that the illustrations had been commissioned through an outside agency which had since shut up shop, taking the contact details with it. The names had never been passed along in the first place. The team running the original browser game did not know them either, so there was nobody left in the chain to ask. A game three years into its second life was publicly asking the internet to help it work out who had drawn the radio pliers and the submersible pump, along with a third character who was a rebar cutter.

The art itself had survived perfectly well. It was sitting right there in the game, being used every day. What got lost was the only thing that cannot be recovered from the files, which is who made it.

~ nine more years ~

The app kept going far longer than the thing it replaced. It picked up a DMM GAMES build in 2020 that drew more than twenty thousand pre-registrations before going live that May, and it was still shipping new characters and events in 2023. On 9 April 2026 the staff announced the end, and the service closed at 14:00 on 30 April. Their own wording was an apology for falling short: 力不足の結果となり大変申し訳ありません.

SE Mobile and Online is still trading. One detail about it is worth correcting for anyone who assumes, as I did on first reading, that the SE stands for Square Enix. It does not. The parent is Shoeisha, the Japanese technical book publisher, and the games company was spun out of its group reorganization in 2006. A textbook house kept a games studio for twenty years and this is one of the things it built.

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