Princess Connect!

~ the obituary ~

Pre-registration opened on 26 November 2014. The game went live on 18 February 2015 as a browser game on smartphone Ameba, CyberAgent's platform, and the Android and iOS builds followed on 19 and 25 March. CyberAgent and Cygames developed it jointly, which is worth stating up front, because the company that published the sequel was only one of those two.

The cast was where the money went. More than fifty voice actors were in it, with Nao Toyama and Risa Taneda named at the launch. The setting was a virtual world: the story takes place inside a VR online game, a premise you could still write in 2015 without anyone calling it dated.

It was an Ameba title, and Ameba is a Japanese account on a Japanese platform, so the question of whether it reached anywhere else never came up. On the afternoon of 7 January 2016 the official account posted that the service would stop at three on 30 June. It did not stop on 30 June.

~ the case file ~

~ the final chapter ~

The plan published alongside the closure was that the story would finish. The main and side stories were to conclude at chapter twelve, released monthly, with the last one landing in May. Limited-time partner characters were moved into the permanent gacha at the same time, so anyone still playing could collect them before the lights went out.

Chapter twelve slipped to the end of June. Instead of closing on schedule with the ending unshipped, the operators pushed the shutdown back a month, to 29 July. Most shutdowns do the opposite and leave the last arc unwritten.

~ the reboot ~

Twenty-three days after it closed, on 21 August 2016, Cygames announced Princess Connect! Re:Dive at its own Cygames NEXT event. Pre-registration for that one opened on 10 July 2017, and it launched on 15 February 2018 on iOS and Android, published by Cygames alone.

Japanese Wikipedia calls Re:Dive a 続編, a sequel, and says it picks up from the final story route of the game that had closed. Famitsu refers to the 2015 version as 前作, the previous work. If you have heard of Princess Connect at all, the thing you have heard of is the second one.

~ what the second one kept ~

On 14 November 2019, three years and change after the servers stopped, Cygames put the entire main story of the original on YouTube. Sixty-three videos, running from about three minutes to about twenty-five. The footage was not the company's own: players had recorded it while the game was running, and handed it over afterwards. Cygames published what they had kept.

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