Raramagi

» see raramagi.wrightflyer.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Raramagi opened on 25 January 2017, built by Wright Flyer Studios with A-1 Pictures credited as the originating studio rather than as a licensor, which is a rarer arrangement than the usual anime tie-in. It was sold as a school RPG of sound and magic. Half a million downloads came in by 15 February and a million and a half by 14 April, and the television campaign started on the 27th of that month.

The setup is a high school instrumental music club down to its last few members and about to be dissolved. You are not a student. You are a tuner, and the thing you tune is what the game calls the sound of a girl's heart, which is how it explains both the combat and the social scenes without having to choose between them. The girls are Einherjar, borrowed from Norse myth, who in the original are the dead that Odin keeps for a war that has not started yet.

WFS posted the closing notice on 3 April 2020. Sales of the in-game currency stopped at three that same afternoon, service ended at the same hour on 3 June, and both store listings came down with it. The notice apologized for how sudden it was, which is boilerplate, and then thanked the people who had kept it running for three years, which reads less like boilerplate given what happened next.

~ the record ~

~ the club nobody could save ~

Everything around the game behaved like it had longer than it did. A web radio show called Rara Raji started on 20 June 2017 and kept going. There was a Comiket booth that August, and a steady drip of acrylic keychains after it. In October 2018 the soundtrack went on sale as a digital release of fifty-nine tracks, with Kenji Ito among the composers, a man whose name on a credit list usually means a company expects to be selling something for a while.

It is worth being plain about what the premise was. A club is about to be closed down for lack of people. You spend the game stopping that from happening.

~ fourteen acts ~

The main story went up in acts. Act fourteen, titled Trust, was published on 9 August 2019. There was no act fifteen. The closing notice arrived just under eight months later and the game ended on a story that had not finished telling itself, which is the normal condition for a dead live service title and is usually where the entry would stop.

~ the ending arrived as a book ~

On 10 September 2020 at seven in the evening, ninety-nine days after the servers went dark, a crowdfunding campaign opened on the Japanese platform Fanbeats to have the story novelized. The structure was all or nothing, the target was six and a half million yen, and the window ran to 19 October. It cleared the target in under thirty minutes.

By the evening of 5 October the total was past eighteen million four hundred thousand yen, roughly two hundred and eighty-four percent of what had been asked for. The money paid for a prose version of all fourteen acts plus a stretch of story that went a little further than the game had ever gone. The book reached backers from July 2021, titled in Japanese for the tuner and the girls of the Einherjar. I can find no sign it was ever sold to anybody else.

Players have paid for plenty of things after a shutdown, mostly merchandise and mostly nostalgia. This is the rarer case where the thing purchased was the missing content itself, commissioned by the audience, from the people who had decided it was not worth making.

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