Project Tokyo Dolls

~ the obituary ~

Square Enix opened this one on 22 June 2017 as a smartphone action RPG built on a property it had made up itself, which is worth saying first because most of what the company shipped to phones in that decade was a famous name with a gacha attached. The setting was a 2017 Tokyo that looked like the real one until you noticed what was underneath it. An idol group called DOLLS did idol work in public and fought an enemy called Pygmalion in private, and the game was free with items for sale, the usual arrangement.

It ran for 1,590 days. Square Enix posted the closing notice on 30 August 2021 and the service ended sixty days after that, at twelve noon on 29 October 2021.

Its whole commercial life took place on the Japanese mobile storefronts and there was never an English version. That is a cleaner wall than a language barrier: a phone bought in Turkey in 2017 pointed at a different store entirely, and a game absent from that list never even reaches the point of being declined. Everything here is reconstructed from Japanese trade press and the operator's own notices.

The catchphrase printed on the marketing was 「それでも私は生き続ける、皆から忘れられたこの世界で」, which goes roughly: even so, I keep on living, in this world where everyone has forgotten me. Someone wrote that to sell an idol game in 2017. It reads differently once you know the service ended with the plot unresolved and the resolution went out separately, on paper, to whoever still cared enough to buy a box.

~ the case file ~

~ the ending shipped in a box ~

On 17 June 2022 Square Enix released the 完結メモリアルセット, a memorial set whose contents included a novel, and printed in that novel was the main story's last chapter. The game had been dead for seven and a half months. Anyone who had played for four years and wanted to know how it came out had to buy a physical object to find out.

This is rarer than it sounds. Plenty of dead live-service games leave their story unfinished and leave it that way, and a few post a summary to a website that then expires. Finishing the narrative in print, after the servers are gone, for a product whose story was delivered in app updates for four years, is a decision somebody had to argue for internally.

~ seventy-seven thousand ~

The pre-launch publicity number was 77,777 registrations, announced as a milestone when it was crossed. The sevens are not an accident and nobody pretended otherwise; it is a marketing figure chosen because it looks good in a headline. It is also the only audience measurement this game ever published. No peak concurrency was ever given out, and no revenue figure for the title on its own. Four years and four months of operation, and the best-attested crowd figure belongs to the week before it opened.

~ noon ~

Most Japanese mobile services die at the end of a day or at the end of a maintenance window, somewhere in the evening or at midnight. This one stopped at 12:00, in the middle of a Friday. That detail is in the operator's notice and in the trade reports, and it means the last hour of play for most people was a lunch break.

Sixty days of notice is about standard for the category, long enough to run a farewell campaign and short enough that nobody expects a buyer to appear. The game went out on schedule and the story followed it into a book the next summer. In between, the catchphrase about being forgotten got to be literally true for a while, before anyone wrote it down.

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