Soul Reverse Zero

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

~ the eulogy ~

Soul Reverse Zero ended on 31 May 2019 at 15:59 Japan time, one minute short of four in the afternoon, which is an oddly precise way to close a thing. Sega announced it on 29 March and stopped selling the paid currency, called Eireiseki, at four o'clock that same afternoon.

It was a free real-time RPG for phones, Japan only, built by the second research and development division of Sega Interactive, which is the studio most people still call AM2. Sega's arcade house made a phone game. Hiroyuki Sawano wrote the opening theme.

The launch went well. Four hundred and fifty thousand people had pre-registered by opening day on 21 November 2016. Half a million downloads landed inside nine days, and a million and a half were in by the end of December. Then the curve flattened hard. It took until September 2017 to reach three million and until October 2018 to reach four, and the fifth million was never announced because it never arrived.

Downloads are the least interesting thing about this one. The other game is where it gets strange.

~ the dossier ~

~ three hundred and sixty-four days ~

Soul Reverse Zero was half of a franchise. The other half was Soul Reverse, an arcade cabinet running ten players against ten, and it was the debut title for Sega's new ALLS UX board. Sega's own announcement in October 2016 called the arcade game the second entry in the series, which tells you the plan: the phone game was the warm-up, and the cabinet was the main event.

The cabinet opened on 22 February 2018 and stopped working on 21 February 2019 at four in the morning. That is 364 days. It died one day short of a year, and the cabinets it had been living in were converted to another game, Chrono Regalia, which launched that same morning.

~ i have no face to show you ~

Fifty-one days after the arcade game launched, 4Gamer ran an interview with its makers under a headline asking why it was struggling. Fifty-one days is not enough time for a cabinet game to find its players, and the question was already being put to them in public.

On 12 October 2018, on day 232, producer Kiyotaka Sakai posted the shutdown notice himself. He wrote that the failure was his own, that he had not managed to assemble properly the finest materials he had been handed. He signed off saying he had no face to show anyone and that he was prostrating himself in apology.

~ the portal is still up ~

Sega turned the phone game into its own museum rather than deleting it: open the app after 31 May 2019 and you got a bundle of scenario recollections and character profiles that worked without a server. Players holding the Special Thanks title at two in the afternoon on 10 May had their usernames printed onto the series portal's front page. That portal, soulreverse.jp, is still answering today, unchanged since March 2018, still offering you a choice between two games that have both been gone for seven years.

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