Tales of Crestoria

~ the eulogy ~

Tales of Crestoria ended service on 7 February 2022 at two in the afternoon Japan time, which for most of the people playing it was the evening of 6 February. Bandai Namco announced it in 2018 and built it with KLab. It ran for nineteen months.

It was a free mobile RPG with a gacha attached, which describes several hundred dead games, so the reason to write this one down is the story it chose to tell. The Tales series had spent twenty-five years on earnest young men who are falsely accused and then vindicated. Crestoria opened with a protagonist named Kanata Hjuger who is actually guilty. He is sentenced to death for it and declines to accept the sentence.

The world was built to press on exactly that. In Crestoria everyone carries a device that records and broadcasts their sins publicly, so guilt is permanent and impossible to outrun. So this was a 2020 phone game built around a permanent public record of everything its characters had done wrong.

~ the dossier ~

~ a boy sentenced to death ~

Kanata was the only son of a respected village leader, which is where the usual Tales arc would begin. He becomes a transgressor, falls in with other transgressors, and the quest is not to clear his name but to break the system that keeps the ledger. The official English copy described it as a tale of crime and camaraderie.

Bandai Namco spent real money establishing this. On 18 October 2020 it put out Tales of Crestoria: The Wake of Sin, a fifteen-minute animated special covering the first chapter, which went up on YouTube and Crunchyroll together at six in the morning. That is a lot of production for a chapter of a phone game, and it is the clearest surviving artifact of how seriously the thing was taken internally.

~ the simultaneous launch ~

The new thing about Crestoria was distribution. Every previous Tales mobile game had come out in Japan first and reached English speakers a year or two later, or never. Crestoria launched in Japan and overseas on the same day, 16 July 2020, after an English open beta in May that ran for five days in Canada and Indonesia and a delay that pushed it out of June. For a franchise whose fans had spent two decades importing and waiting, a simultaneous worldwide release was the headline feature.

~ the crossover roster ~

The business model, as always, was the old characters. Crestoria's own cast was original, but the banners filled up with protagonists pulled out of previous Tales games, which is how a nineteen-month-old title convinces someone who played Symphonia in 2004 to spend money in 2021.

The borrowing cuts the other way too, because Crestoria's own cast exists nowhere else. Kanata was never ported into a sequel or folded into a crossover title, so the end of service on 7 February 2022 took the only complete telling of his story with it, leaving the anime short and whatever footage players had thought to record.

~ one apology, twenty-two words ~

The notice went up on 7 December 2021, two months ahead, and purchases of Gleamstones stopped that day while anything already in your account stayed usable to the end. The statement itself read: "We regret to announce the closure of Tales of Crestoria. Thank you all for your support and we hope you enjoyed playing." No reason was offered then and none has been offered since.

My distance from this one needs stating plainly, because geography plays no part in it for once. Crestoria shipped in English, everywhere, on day one, onto a phone already in my pocket, the year I turned thirty-six and was doing computer-vision work in Ankara. It was entirely available to me and I played none of it. A daily energy timer plus a banner rotation is a commitment to somebody else's schedule, and I had stopped being a person who signs up for those. Access was never what kept me off this game.

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