Precatus no Tenbin

~ the last words ~

Fuji Games announced the title on 3 August 2018. Until that day the project had been going by a placeholder, Project7, and the reveal came with a staged dramatic reading set to live music. The seven was the structure. A continent called Oldia holds seven countries, each with a protagonist of its own, and the story works through what each of them did and whether the word for it is justice or crime.

Most of the credits were bought in. Character designs came from Hirotaka Maeda of Rejet, the score from Hidenori Sakamoto of Noisycroak, and Eiji Akatsuki consulted on the scenario on the strength of a Steins;Gate spin-off. The voice cast ran to Yuichi Nakamura and Kana Hanazawa, with Yuki Kaji and Tomokazu Sugita alongside them. Over the top of that Fuji cast two screen actors rather than voice actors, Kanna Hashimoto and Kentaro Ito, as characters named Noel and Travis.

It launched on 31 October 2018 and was sold as a multi-angle RPG. Eleven weeks later it ran an Attack on Titan crossover. In June 2019 the soundtrack went on sale. On 1 November 2019 the in-game notice board said the servers would stop on 6 January, and they did.

~ the record ~

~ one point four million ~

The pre-registration curve is a matter of record because Fuji Games published every milestone as a press release. Thirty thousand on 17 August 2018. A hundred thousand on 10 September, three hundred thousand four days after that, five hundred thousand a week later, a million by the 28th. It read 1.3 million on 5 October and 1.4 million by the day it opened.

The rewards at each tier tell you who the campaign was aimed at. Thirty thousand sign-ups unlocked original Gachapin and Mukku merchandise. Gachapin is a green dinosaur and Mukku is a red yeti, both of them Fuji Television children's presenters since the 1970s, and in October 2018 the pair were posting on TikTok on behalf of a dark fantasy about justice and sin. Fuji owned the mascots and Fuji used them.

~ what fuji wanted ~

Fuji Games had been set up in April 2016 as the network's game arm. Fuji Media Holdings told the trade press it wanted the studio turning over ten billion yen a year with two billion in operating profit by around 2020, a target a broadcaster only writes down once it has decided that games are where the growth comes from.

Precatus was not a licensing deal and not a port. The launch release describes it as the first project built on an in-house smartphone RPG engine Fuji Games had written itself, which is a sentence a company only publishes when it intends to write several more games on that engine. The first project ran fourteen months.

~ announced inside the app ~

4Gamer's report of 1 November 2019 carries a note that at the time of writing the closure had been posted only to the game's in-game notices. A title that had collected 1.4 million pre-registrations with a television network's mascots behind it told the people who were still opening it, and told nobody else. If you had drifted off in the spring, the way most of 1.4 million people do, there was no second place to find out from.

~ the soundtrack outlived it ~

The album went on sale on 5 June 2019, with an advance run sold at Tokyo Game Tacto 2019, a game-music concert. Of everything made for this game, Sakamoto's score is what survives as an object somebody can still buy. The studio behind it is still trading, under its third name, Fuji Nextera Lab, after a spell as Fuji Culture X, and it is still shipping browser games onto GREE.

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