Sakura Ignoramus

» see marv.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The investors heard first. On 24 March 2023 Marvelous published a notice titled, in translation, an announcement regarding the recording of an operating loss and a revision of the full-year consolidated forecast. Seven days later it published a second one, signed with the company name and addressed to players, saying that Sakura Ignoramus would end. The game had been on sale for twenty-five days when the first document went out.

It was a simulation RPG, free with item charges, released for iOS and Android on 27 February 2023. The producer was Jun Imaizumi, who had made Phantom of the Kill and The Alchemist Code at gumi, and the world and scenario work was credited to Oji Hiroi, the creator of Sakura Wars. Press coverage put the development at around three years. The setting and the cast were carried over from Shinobi Nightmare, a 2016 gumi release, so none of the characters arriving in February 2023 were actually new.

Nothing about it left Japan. There was no English build and no overseas service to wind down. The one piece of it that is readable from anywhere, today, is the 24 March filing, which still sits as a PDF on the company's corporate site because a listed Japanese company does not take its disclosures down. The game is gone and the paperwork about the game is permanent.

~ the record ~

~ the money came back ~

The 31 March notice said that regardless of whether the paid Yushoseki had been consumed, the full amount paid would be refunded. The clause about consumption is the unusual half. A closing game normally refunds what is still sitting in your wallet, on the reasoning that unspent currency is a debt and spent currency was a purchase you already received. Marvelous treated two months of service as too short for anything to count as received, and gave back money players had turned into pulls weeks earlier.

Which created a small logistical problem, because proving who had spent what meant reading save data. So the notice asked players not to delete the app and not to reinstall it when changing handsets. From the end of March onward, the correct way to hold a dead game was to leave it on your phone and not touch it.

~ the setting died twice ~

Shinobi Nightmare launched in 2016 and closed at a date nobody has clearly published, remembered in the Japanese trade press as a title people were sorry to lose. In November 2017 gumi's subsidiary FgG had bought the rights to it outright, along with Phantom of the Kill and The Alchemist Code, from Fuji&gumi Games as gumi sold down its stake in that company. Studio FgG announced Sakura Ignoramus on 5 November 2022 as a new game built out of that same world.

So the same fiction was closed down twice inside one corporate family, which had paid money in between for the privilege of owning it. Reviving a setting is the safe move in Japanese mobile gaming, because the art already exists and part of the audience is already attached to it. The cast that came back for the second attempt, Himawari and Sazanka among them, got two months of work. None of those performances exist in a form anyone can buy now.

~ the second notice that day ~

The loss announcement was not the only thing Marvelous filed on 24 March 2023. The company's own 2023 news archive lists a second release from the same date, about reducing director remuneration. One document said the money was gone and the next said the board would be paid less for it, and both went up before anybody playing the game was told it was ending.

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