Tales of Link

» see tales-ch.jp/tolink as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Tales of Link arrived on the Japanese App Store on 3 March 2014, built by Akatsuki with Bandai Namco Studios and published by what was then still Bandai Namco Games. The Android version followed on 23 April. It sold itself as the connecting RPG, which was a description of the control scheme rather than a slogan about friendship, although it was happy to be read as both.

It moved quickly at the start. Akatsuki announced two hundred thousand iOS downloads on 28 March 2014, twenty five days after release, and by the Android launch seven weeks later the figure it printed was over three hundred thousand. Those are the only two download numbers the companies ever put on the record for it.

On 25 January 2018, at four minutes past eight in the evening Tokyo time, the Tales channel account posted that the game would end on 28 March. The notice thanked players and said all further announcements would be made inside the app. It did not say why. The game ran the full sixty two days and closed on schedule.

~ the record ~

~ drawing the line ~

Akatsuki's press material called it a new-feeling touch link battle system, which in practice meant your characters sat on a grid and you dragged a finger through them. Every character the line passed through joined the attack, so a turn was a question of routing rather than selection. The appeal was that the whole party piled in at once, and the skill was in finding the path that caught the most of them.

That is a real mechanic and not a menu with art on it, which is worth saying because the mobile Tales games are usually lumped together as one undifferentiated pile of gacha. Link was not quite a card game. It was a puzzle you solved with the roster you happened to own.

~ where the story went ~

Bandai Namco did something with Link's scenario that it did not do for most of its dead phone games. Rather than let the story go down with the servers, it moved the whole thing into Tales of the Rays, the action-RPG that had launched a year earlier, as a readable archive sitting inside another product's menus.

So for six more years you could read Link's story, provided you installed a different game to do it. Rays closed in July 2024 and the archive it was housing closed with it. A story that survives only as a guest in someone else's house survives exactly as long as the house does.

~ the same date twice ~

There were two versions and both of them ended inside a single Japanese calendar day. The English release, which had only existed since 2016, kept its servers up until seven in the evening Pacific time on 27 March 2018. That instant was already the morning of 28 March in Tokyo, where the original closed the same day.

The two builds were wound down on different schedules, though. Bandai Namco switched off paid currency in the English version the moment it announced the closure back in January, while Japanese players kept buying hero stones until 26 February.

The neat part is the date itself. On 28 March 2014, Akatsuki put out a press release celebrating the two hundred thousandth download and started a login campaign to mark it. On 28 March 2018, four years later to the day, Bandai Namco switched them off. No notice at either end made the connection.

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