Tales of Luminaria

~ the eulogy ~

Bandai Namco put Tales of Luminaria on Japanese phones on 3 November 2021 and everywhere else the next day. The series had been running on consoles since the mid-nineties, and this was the first entry designed as a mobile game from the start instead of ported into one. The work went to Colopl, an outside studio, while the console line carried on without it.

The selling point was the character count. Twenty-one playable leads, all unlocked once you cleared the tutorial, sorted into factions on opposite sides of the same war, each carrying a campaign written from that person's vantage. Episodes landed weekly. The promise was that you would eventually watch one conflict from twenty-one positions and see the pieces meet.

On 10 May 2022 the termination notice went up. Service would end at 19:00 PDT on 19 July, which is 11:00 JST on 20 July, one instant written twice for two audiences. That left seventy-one days of notice and a total run of eight months and sixteen days from the worldwide launch.

The weekly episodes simply stopped where they had got to. The notice said as much in the developers' own words: they could not finish showing what became of the twenty-one, and the releases ended partway through. A game that asks you back every week for twenty-one separate serials is asking for a particular kind of attention, and I was never one of the people it asked. What the notice admits is the unusual part. Studios very rarely put in writing that the story is unfinished.

~ the dossier ~

~ twenty-one doors ~

Most games in this shape give you a cast and one plot. Luminaria gave you twenty-one entrances to the same plot and let you pick which side of a war you wanted to be wrong about. You started as Leo, finished the tutorial, and then the whole roster opened at once rather than arriving through a gacha pull. For a free mobile title in 2021 that was an unusually generous way to spend the budget, and it is probably also why the budget ran out.

~ episode final ~

When the closure was announced the team put out a stopgap called Episode Final, set before the events of the anime, so that players had something shaped like a conclusion to reach. Nobody claimed it was the ending the weekly serials had been walking toward. Ten weeks is not enough room to land a story built for years.

Players had until 19 July to read it. After that the servers answered nothing, and for a game whose entire content was episodic text and battles delivered from those servers, that left nothing on the phone to open. There is no offline mode anywhere in it.

~ the anime outlived it ~

Tales of Luminaria: The Fateful Crossroad premiered on 21 January 2022 as a two-part original net animation from Kamikaze Douga and Anima. It was promotional material. Its job was to sell the game, and the game was fifteen weeks from its own termination notice on the day it aired.

The anime is still there. Studios archive their work, and a twenty-minute animated short costs nothing to leave online. A live service costs money every day it answers, so the advertisement is what survives and the product it was advertising is the part that went missing.

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