Sanrio Characters Fantasy Theater

~ the obituary ~

Sanrio licenses its characters to almost anyone who asks and has done for decades, which is why Hello Kitty has been both an airplane livery and a line of power tools. In January 2016 the licensee was Sega Games, and the product was a phone puzzle game under the "WITH Sanrio" banner. Pre-registration opened on 14 January and passed fifty thousand within a fortnight, which unlocked a free Kuromi for everyone who signed up.

The framing had more care in it than the brief can have required. The characters were paper dolls, flat jointed cutouts, and the game was staging fairy tales with them, from Cinderella to Momotaro. You played by grabbing pieces as they fell and attaching them to matching pieces to clear them, with the fairy-tale set as the backdrop and the Sanrio cast as the actors.

Sega called it a dramatic puzzle game. The casting was the joke and the game knew it, most obviously when Gudetama was cast as Sannen Netaro, the folk-tale figure who slept for three years.

Hello Kitty, My Melody, Pompompurin and Cinnamoroll filled out the cast. PUFFY recorded the theme song. There was a dressing-room gacha added in July and a Show By Rock crossover somewhere in the run. By the standards of a licensed mobile puzzle game in 2016 this was a well-made thing with real money behind it.

It closed on 30 November 2016. The source for that is a joint press release from Sanrio and a company called Chiffon, posted to Sanrio's own corporate news archive on 2 December, which states plainly that Sega Games' operation of the title ended on Wednesday 30 November. For a game this small, having a first-party document rather than a trade-press summary is unusual luck. No reason appears anywhere I could reach. The launch day is the fuzzier end: the press put the release at 27, 28 or 29 January depending on which outlet and which store you believe, so this page dates the birth to the month and leaves it there.

~ the case file ~

~ the name outlived the operator ~

The press release announcing the death is also the press release announcing the sequel, which is an unusual document. Chiffon had licensed the title from Sanrio with Sega Games' permission, and on the same page where Sega's operation ends, Chiffon says it is making a new Fantasy Theater. The release is careful to say the new game inherits neither the old game's systems nor its data, and that the content would be entirely new.

So the thing that continued was the name. Pre-registration for the successor opened on 10 August 2017 and it launched on 29 September 2017 as Fun! Fun! Fantasy Theater, a different game from a different company under the same title. The gap between the two is ten months, which is almost exactly as long as the original had been alive. The player who had spent money on paper-doll Cinderella in the spring got nothing out of that except the chance to start again.

~ ten months ~

Ten months is the detail that keeps this interesting. Sega had the Sanrio license, a pre-registration campaign that hit its targets, a pop duo on the theme song and a visual idea better than the genre asked for, and it still pulled the game inside a year. Nothing published says why. Sega Games ended the operation, Sanrio and Chiffon announced that it had ended, and not one of those documents offers a cause. What can be said is what the calendar shows. The last event the trade press bothered to write up was a summer constellation collection in August, nearly four months before the end. For a game that had launched in January with a fifty-thousand-person pre-registration campaign, the coverage had stopped long before the servers did.

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