Saiki Kusuo no Psi Nan: Mousou Bousou Psi Kick Battle

~ the eulogy ~

The source material is Shuichi Aso's Saiki Kusuo no Psi Nan, a comedy manga about a high school student with every psychic power there is whose only goal is to be left alone. It ran in Weekly Shonen Jump and had six million copies in print by the time the game was announced. It also ended in that magazine in February 2018, which means the tie-in opened on 16 April 2018 with its source material already finished. The game DLE published was a tower defense: you place units on a lane and the enemies walk into them.

I have not read the manga and the anime did not air anywhere I was watching, which puts this one in the category of products I can date precisely and cannot remember at all. The appeal of a licensed tower defense is that it does not require you to know the license. The appeal of this one, for its actual audience, was newly recorded voice work from the television cast and an original scenario.

It reached 700,000 downloads, which DLE announced as a milestone. Then DLE announced on 22 April 2019 that the service would end, and on 19 July 2019 it did, 459 days after launch.

~ the dossier ~

~ okinawa ~

DLE published it, but the development and the running of it afterward both belonged to Churapps, a studio in Okinawa that DLE owned completely. That is an unusual arrangement in Japanese mobile games, where the work tends to concentrate in Tokyo and Osaka. Okinawa is a prefecture that has spent years trying to build a technology sector with tax incentives, and a games studio there was part of that argument.

Churapps had been set up to do exactly this kind of work, and this was the title it was known for outside the island.

~ eighty-eight days ~

Notice went out on 22 April 2019 and the service ran until 19 July, which is eighty-eight days of knowing exactly when the thing you are playing will stop.

What was happening above the game is the part worth putting next to those dates. DLE had been through an accounting scandal in 2018, and in May 2019 it took a share issue from Asahi Broadcasting Group Holdings that turned it into a subsidiary, with founder Ryuta Shiiki resigning as the person answerable for it. The closure of this title was announced in the April before that. No notice ever connected the two, and nobody printed that link. The sequence is on the record; what it caused is not.

~ the manga outlived it ~

The manga kept selling in collected volumes after its serialization ended, and the anime went on reaching audiences the game never got near. Of everything in this arrangement the tie-in was the piece built to be thrown away, which is the deal every licensed mobile game signs and very few of them get to renegotiate.

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