Tales of Asteria

~ the eulogy ~

The pitch was a reunion. Characters from across the Tales series, which had been running on consoles since 1995, all turned up in one phone game together, and the genre label Bandai Namco printed on it translated roughly as "an RPG where crossing feelings connect". The structure was unusual for a gacha game: it was built in chapters, each with its own lead character and its own theme song, and you could start from whichever one you liked rather than working forward through a single spine. Six of them were in the game by April 2021.

It opened on Google Play on 3 April 2014 and on the App Store three weeks later, free to play with items for sale. The animated sequences were made by WIT Studio, who were working on Attack on Titan at the same time, with one chapter handled by A-1 Pictures instead. The theme songs came from Do As Infinity and Bonnie Pink, among others, one per chapter, which is an expensive way to build a mobile game and a sign of how much weight the publisher was putting on the thing.

Underneath that, the development changed hands twice without the players being given any reason to notice. KLab's Okayama office built it. When that office was spun off as its own company the work moved to Makane Soft, and from there it moved again to Makane's parent, Sakura Soft. Three studios on one codebase inside seven years.

~ the dossier ~

~ the gazette notice ~

Sakura Soft received a bankruptcy decision on 7 April 2021, and the fact became public in the official gazette of 16 April. The trade press sorted the company's titles into two piles that week. Shinso no Valkyrie was closing. Teikoku Senki and Tales of Asteria were listed as being adjusted toward continuation, which is the polite Japanese formula for nobody having decided yet.

On 20 April, four days after the gazette, Bandai Namco posted on the game's official Twitter account that it would be reviewing the operating structure. Then the game ran for two more years. Whatever arrangement the publisher made to keep a live service going after the company holding the engineers had gone into insolvency, it held, and it held long enough that the eventual shutdown had nothing to do with it.

~ the part i never played ~

I have not played a single entry in the Tales series, on any platform, in any year. Japanese console RPGs were not a retail category in Turkey in the 1990s, and by the time a phone could run one I was thirty and the series was nineteen years into its own continuity. A crossover is the hardest kind of game to come to late: the whole appeal is recognizing people, and I recognized nobody.

~ noon on the eighteenth ~

Bandai Namco announced the ending on 16 March 2023 and closed the service at noon on 18 May, nine weeks later. The wind-down was more generous than most: a finale broadcast, a memorial book collecting the illustrations, the soundtrack pushed out through Bandai Namco Game Music, and a transfer campaign that handed players something in Tales of the Rays if they went there instead.

Rays closed on 23 July 2024, fourteen months after inheriting them.

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