Star Ocean: Anamnesis

» see staroceangame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

this was a game for people with twenty years of star ocean already in their head. i am not one of them. the series started on the super famicom in 1996 and by 2016 its whole appeal was recognition, which is a currency you either hold or you do not, and turkey in the nineties was not a place where japanese role playing games arrived on time or at all.

star ocean: anamnesis was built by tri-ace, the studio behind every mainline star ocean game, and published by square enix for android and ios. it launched in japan on 7 december 2016 as the twentieth anniversary product. it passed three million downloads before the end of that month. the english version followed on 10 july 2018, a year and a half behind.

mechanically it was a real time action rpg with four player battles, running on tri-ace's aska engine with backgrounds and character models carried over from star ocean: integrity and faithlessness. motoi sakuraba, who had scored the series since the beginning, wrote the music, and akira yasuda drew the characters. the production values were not the problem.

the problem was the business it was in. anamnesis was a gacha game, which means the loop is pulling for characters, and the characters that make people pull are the ones they already love. so square enix ran crossovers with valkyrie profile, resonance of fate, nier: automata, sakura wars, attack on titan, guilty gear, final fantasy brave exvius and persona. an anniversary celebration turned into a machine for borrowing other franchises' audiences.

~ the dossier ~

~ sixteen months ~

the english shutdown was announced on 6 august 2019 and executed on 5 november. that is sixteen months of service from launch. kotaku's write-up of the western version called it exploitative and charming in the same breath, praising what it did with nostalgia while flatly disliking the free to play design wrapped around it, which is roughly the correct verdict on the entire category.

a western star ocean audience of the size a gacha economy needs did not exist. the series had never been a mass seller outside japan. the mobile version needed the kind of paying core that a mid-tier jrpg franchise does not have in markets where most people have not played any of it.

~ the japanese ending ~

japan kept it running another nineteen months. square enix announced on 22 april 2021 that service would end, and it ended on 24 june 2021, four and a half years after launch. by mobile rpg standards that is a decent run rather than a triumph.

what square enix did next is unusual enough to note. it released an offline version containing the first three episodes of the story and whatever character models the player had already acquired, with only a limited set of the collaboration characters carried across. most gacha games leave nothing behind when the servers go, because the game is the server. anamnesis left a fragment you could still open.

~ the long tail ~

the licensing is why the offline build is a fragment rather than a copy. every crossover character in it belonged to somebody else, on a contract with an end date, and when the service closed those rights went home. the game that had spent three years borrowing audiences could not keep what it borrowed.

star ocean itself survived the experiment. the divine force shipped in 2022 as a full console release, which is the form the series has always actually worked in. the mobile anniversary is now a thing you read about, plus a partial offline client sitting on some japanese phone that nobody has factory reset.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »