Sword Chronicle (ソードクロニクル〜世界樹の秘宝〜)

~ the obit ~

It was a formation RPG, which is a genre label you only see in the Japanese mobile market. Battles ran in turns, and between turns you rearranged the line: phantom beasts with high health and defense went in front as a shield, high-attack units stayed behind them and did the damage. Underneath that was a fantasy about a world named Dragon's Heim, built by a creator god called the Dragon King, where a girl named Yuna pulls the player into a conspiracy by the Avalon Empire and the obstruction of four heavenly kings.

gumi put it on Google Play in Japan on 3 April 2014 and on the Japanese App Store on 17 June, after a pre-registration campaign opened on 15 May. It was free to play, with a paid currency called magic crystals. There was a Chinese version as well, run with Shanda Games.

The service stopped on 25 June 2015. gamebiz wrote it up on the 29th, four days afterward, which is the write-up a title gets when nobody is watching it closely enough to report the notice in advance. The piece is mostly a refund note: unused crystals that had been paid for could be claimed back.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the title it was built from ~

This game started life as a different game. Dragon King and the Hero Alen: Treasure of the World Tree had been running since September 2013, and Sword Chronicle was that title rebuilt and relaunched under a new name in April 2014. The pre-registration announcement said so in its own headline, carrying the old name in brackets so that the existing players would know what they were signing up to.

What makes it odd is that gumi did not switch the original off when the replacement arrived. The old version kept running until 25 December 2014, closing on the same day as another gumi title called Sangokutsu! Tactics, which means the company operated the game and its own upgraded copy of the game side by side for nearly nine months.

~ two copies of one game ~

The arithmetic is almost symmetrical. The original ran about fifteen months, from September 2013 to Christmas Day 2014. The rebuild ran about fourteen, from April 2014 to June 2015. Neither version of this world reached sixteen months, and together they occupy less than two years of calendar time, because they overlap by nearly nine months of it.

I was thirty when this launched and had never heard of it until I went looking. Japanese formation RPGs did not reach Turkey in any form, and this one was a renamed rebuild of a title that had not reached here either.

~ eleven weeks after the listing ~

The context around the shutdown is the part worth keeping. gumi had gone public on the first section of the Tokyo exchange on 18 December 2014, and on 5 March 2015 it revised its forecast for the year ending that April, taking revenue down from 30.97 billion yen to 26.5 billion and turning a projected 1.33 billion yen operating profit into a 400 million yen loss. The trade press reported the overseas performance of Brave Frontier as a cause, along with the fixed costs of expanding abroad.

The market's response was blunt. The stock hit its limit down on two consecutive sessions from 6 March, and president Hiromichi Kunimitsu took a 100 percent cut to his monthly pay for six months. The whole episode got filed in Japan under the phrase for a listing that was the goal in itself. On 1 June the forecast went back up to a 416 million yen operating profit, credited to the native apps that were working, Phantom of the Kill among them, and to rationalization. Three and a half weeks later this game was gone.

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