Pastel Memories

» see pastel-memories.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Pastel Memories opened on 23 October 2017, an iOS and Android game from a studio called Coreedge, set in a shop in Akihabara. The premise was that works of fiction were being corrupted from the inside and somebody had to go into them and repair the damage before they were lost.

A twelve-episode anime ran from 8 January to 26 March 2019. Ten weeks after the last episode aired, on 7 June, Coreedge posted the notice. The wording is the standard formula, 誠に勝手ながら, which is what a Japanese company writes when it is about to do something entirely at its own convenience, followed by the date: Tuesday 6 August 2019 at 15:00.

Nothing followed it by way of a reason. The run came to about a year and nine months.

~ the record ~

~ the goodbye in installments ~

What Coreedge did with the two months it had left is the unusual part. It kept shipping. Chapter six of the affinity stories went up on 11 June and the prologue of Part 2 on the 17th. The finale of Part 2 landed on 25 June, each of them at 15:00.

That put the ending of the story six weeks ahead of the end of the service. A game dying mid-sentence is ordinary; this one wrote its last line first and then went.

~ the text that outlived it ~

On 20 June the official account posted that a great many people had asked for an オフライン化, an offline version, and that the studio had gone looking for some way to leave Pastel Memories behind. What it found was Dengeki Online. The main quest and the stories attached to it would be archived as text, テキストだけになりますが, text only, with the magazine's cooperation.

Sixteen articles went up between 29 June and 4 August 2019, each a transcript with speaker labels in front of the lines. The stated scope was the main scenario plus some of the sub-quests. The last installment carried a comment from the producer. The series finished two days before the game did, and on the evening of 6 August, hours after the servers stopped, Dengeki published a page linking all sixteen together.

They are still there. The domain is not: www.pastel-memories.com now serves a registrar's notice saying the name was registered through Onamae.com. What survived this game is a Japanese transcript on a Japanese games site, and the dates on it are about as much of it as I can reach.

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