Starry Palette (スターリィパレット)

~ the obituary ~

The announcement came first by a very long way. In March 2016, DMM.com OVERRIDE put on an event it called a new idol project presentation and unveiled this as a title for PC browsers and phones. Then development stopped. The Japanese record says the planning and the build were suspended over technical problems, and when the project came back the contents had been renewed and the browser version had been dropped from the launch.

What shipped on 21 November 2018 was a phone-only rhythm game about nine male students in the idol club of Seika Academy, grouped as a unit called stirRhythm, with a foul-mouthed instructor and a player character whose job was club manager. The cast ran to Yuto Suzuki and Toshiki Masuda, with Shouta Aoi as the youngest of the nine and Kishow Taniyama as the instructor. Free to play with items for sale, and abbreviated to Stapare by everyone including the publisher.

On 7 May 2019 DMM announced that in-game updates were stopping, because part one of the main story had reached its conclusion, and that future plans would be announced later. The later announcement came on 14 August, and it was two notices on one day: the rights to the project were going to the producer and the app would close, while the PC version that had been promised again was formally canceled. Service ended at noon on 6 September 2019, nine months and sixteen days after it started.

~ the case file ~

~ the radio arrived two years early ~

There was a web radio show, Stapa Radio, on HiBiKi Radio Station, hosted by Suzuki and Masuda in character as two of the idols. It went out on the first Wednesday of the month, and the dates are the strangest thing in this entire record: it ran from 4 April 2016 to 29 August 2016, took a pause of about eighteen months, came back on 7 February 2018, and finished on 1 May 2019.

So the promotional radio show for this game broadcast for five months before anyone could play it, went quiet across the year and a half the project spent suspended, returned nine months before launch, and signed off four months before the servers did. Counted in months on air, the radio show about the game lasted twice as long as the game.

~ part one was all of it ~

The May notice is the real end date for anybody playing. Updates stopped, the story stopped where part one stopped, and the four months between that and the closure announcement were a live service with nothing new arriving in it.

The refunds followed store policy. Unused paid Stars were refundable on iOS, and DMM stated plainly that unused paid Stars on Android were not eligible, so two people could have spent the same money on the same game on the same day and only one of them would have got it back.

~ the scenario, posted for free ~

On 3 March 2020, six months after the shutdown, the producer restarted the project and published the main scenario and the stills for nothing. That is an unusual thing to do. The normal end state for a dead phone game is that the story is simply gone, locked inside a client nobody can log into, and here it was put back on the web as reading material.

Some of it kept going for a while after that. A free premiere of voice drama and songs went out on YouTube on 10 January 2021, and a first drama live followed on 27 February. The project's own site, project-starry.com, does not resolve today.

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