SINoALICE

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

~ the obituary ~

Japanese gacha on a phone was a shelf I never stood in front of, and by 2017 I was thirty three and building things for a living rather than grinding for them. What made me stop on SINoALICE afterward was the ending, and specifically the fact that it was given one.

Square Enix and Pokelabo released it in Japan on 6 June 2017, on Android and iOS, free with item purchases. Yoko Taro, the director behind Drakengard and NieR, wrote the world and ran it as creative director. Jino designed the characters and Keiichi Okabe scored it with MONACA, the same team that wrote the NieR soundtracks. The tagline translated to something like the worst story there is.

It fell over on day one. Enough people signed up at once to take the servers down, and the company formally suspended the launch until the afternoon of 7 June. The Colosseum, the guild-versus-guild mode that the whole game was built around, stayed unplayable for weeks and only ran properly from 3 August after a month of open testing. None of that slowed it: two million players by 23 June, number one on the Japanese App Store grossing chart by 27 June.

It spread from there. A Taiwanese publisher, KOMOE, took it to Taiwan and Hong Kong from 29 November 2018. A PC version arrived on DMM Games on 30 June 2020, and the English global release followed on 1 July 2020 after Nexon dropped the localization and handed publishing back to Pokelabo.

~ the case file ~

~ the premise ~

The setting is called the Library. Snow White and Alice and a long shelf of others exist inside it as Characters, and each one wants her author resurrected. Gathering the life essence needed for that means killing the other Characters, who all want the same thing for their own authors. Everybody in the game knows this from the first line.

Around that sat a fairly ordinary stamina-and-gacha structure: spend AP on quests, pull weapons, level jobs, fight in the Colosseum every evening against another guild. The machinery was standard for its market. What people wrote about for six years was the writing wrapped around it, which was bleak in a way phone games are usually not allowed to be.

~ the ending it wrote ~

Service end was announced on 26 October 2023. No reason was given, which is normal, and the schedule was staged, which is not.

The global servers went first, at 5am UTC on 15 November 2023. In-app currency purchases had already stopped and refunds were offered on unspent balances. On 20 December 2023 the Japanese version published the final chapter of the story, an actual written conclusion rather than a maintenance notice. The DMM Games PC version closed on 26 December. The Japanese mobile servers, the original ones from 2017, went dark on 15 January 2024.

There was a film too. SINoALICE: The Very Last Story opened in Japanese cinemas on 23 February 2024, written by Yoko Taro and animated by ILCA, offering an alternate ending to a game that had already shut down.

~ what stayed ~

After the servers closed the app did not vanish from phones. It was replaced by a viewer-only build with a title that translates to roughly Something That Was SINoALICE, holding the art and the text without any of the game attached. Most dead phone games leave a store page returning a 404 and a wiki somebody stops updating. This one left a small museum, published by the people who had run it.

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