Rakugaki Kingdom

~ the obituary ~

Taito put up a countdown site on 5 July 2019 and announced the game six days later. ラクガキ キングダム was the first entry in the Rakugaki line in fifteen years, since ラクガキ王国2 on the PlayStation 2, and it carried over the single mechanic the series existed for. You drew a creature, and the creature became a character you took into battle.

The clever part was what they deliberately kept apart. What you drew had no bearing on what the character could do, because the parameters were stored apart from the art. Redraw a creature completely and it kept every stat and skill it had earned, which meant the game doubled as a modeling tool for people who only wanted to draw.

It opened on 28 January 2021 and closed at two in the afternoon on 2 November the same year. Taito's notice said the company had concluded, after discussion, that it would be difficult to go on providing a service customers would be satisfied with. That is a Japan-only store release from 2021, which puts it outside every window this site is usually nostalgic about.

~ the case file ~

~ the drawing machine ~

Creations went into a shared space called ラクガキガレージ, where other players could download your work and raise it themselves. Underneath, every drawing was held as a VRM file, the open avatar format, and the app could talk to pixiv's VRoid Hub. Taito had wired in the format's copyright flags too, so a protected drawing used even partially would block the upload slot it sat in.

The cast was heavier than a doodle game needs. The tanuki spirit who followed you around was voiced by Masako Nozawa, who has been Goku since 1986, and the guide beside her was Miyuki Sawashiro.

~ delays and a renewal ~

The original window was winter 2019 running into early 2020. It slipped to summer 2020 for quality reasons, then slipped again to January 2021.

Version 2.0 landed on 28 July 2021 and rebuilt parts of the game. The shutdown was announced thirty-six days after that.

Counted properly the arithmetic is unkind. Five hundred and sixty-seven days passed between the announcement and the launch, and the game then lived two hundred and seventy-eight. It spent more than twice as long being promised as it spent being played.

~ the door they left open ~

Most dead games take your work with them. This one did not. When the closure was announced Taito told players they could push their Rakugaki into VRoid Hub through pixiv's VRoid Mobile app and keep them as 3D avatars, which means the creatures people drew are still loadable files somewhere, years after the servers they were made on went dark.

Nothing about that was generous, exactly. It worked because the drawings sat in a standard format instead of a private one, and a standard outlives the company that adopted it. Taito gave its players a door out of a building it was about to demolish. Almost nobody does.

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