Terra Battle

» see terra-battle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Terra Battle sold itself with a number instead of a trailer. Mistwalker put a public counter on the web showing how many times the game had been installed, and promised to keep adding things to the game as that counter climbed, which made the install itself the pledge. I read about that twice in 2014 and still never downloaded it, which puts me among the people the counter was waiting on.

The game came out on 9 October 2014 for iOS and Android. It was a tile-based tactical RPG, directed by Koji Ohno and produced by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who created Final Fantasy and left Square to start Mistwalker in Honolulu. You moved a character onto a grid and the enemies between your pieces got crushed in the pincer, which borrowed as much from puzzle games as from the tactical RPGs Sakaguchi's name usually implies. It was Mistwalker's first attempt at running a live service rather than shipping a finished game.

Sakaguchi called the funding idea a Download Starter and was open about where he got it, which was Kickstarter. The difference was that nobody paid. You installed a free game and the install was the contribution, so the money came later through in-app purchases while the counter did the work a crowdfunding page usually does. For about seven months it worked unusually well.

~ the record ~

~ unlocking a composer ~

What the counter bought was music, mostly. Nobuo Uematsu was already writing the soundtrack, and passing 100,000 installs bought more of it. Further up the scale the game started buying other people's work: Kenji Ito at 1.6 million and Yoko Shimomura at 1.7 million, with Yasunori Mitsuda arriving a hundred thousand installs after that.

Read that list as a lineup and it is absurd in a specific way. These are the people who scored Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, hired one at a time by a free phone game as a reward for being downloaded. Later tiers added a novel at 2.1 million and Hitoshi Sakimoto at 2.2 million, and the ladder ran up toward three million.

~ the promise nobody planned for ~

The milestone that mattered sat at two million, where Mistwalker had promised a console version. Terra Battle passed it on 30 April 2015, about six months after release, and Mistwalker duly announced that console development was beginning.

Days later Sakaguchi said the quiet part out loud. He had thought two million was a far-away goal, and the studio did not actually have anything planned for it. No console version of Terra Battle was ever released or meaningfully shown. The counter had written a check against a product nobody had yet designed, and the prize at the top of the ladder stayed unbuilt.

~ what mistwalker learned ~

The sequels went worse than the original. Terra Battle 2 shipped on 21 September 2017 and was pulled from the storefronts on 3 June 2018, with its servers closing that September, under a year old. A spinoff called Terra Wars was announced alongside it in June 2017 and did not last either. By 2020 the first game was the only one still running, five years past the milestone that was supposed to have launched it onto consoles.

Mistwalker announced the end on 29 May 2020 and stopped selling energy the same day. Support for transferring save data closed on 15 June at 14:59 UTC, and the service terminated on 30 June at 00:00 UTC. Sakaguchi's own note said this had been the studio's first smartphone service-type RPG and that he regarded it as a valuable lesson, which is a polite way to describe six years of learning to operate something. He was already building Fantasian for Apple Arcade by then, a game sold once, with dioramas built by hand and no counter on the front page.

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