Towa Tsugai (トワツガイ)

» see jp.square-enix.com/towatsugai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A game whose tagline was about dying a second time ended up dying three times, on three separate dates, each one announced properly in advance.

Towa Tsugai was a phone RPG about girls called Tori, birds, fighting something that was eating the world, and the mechanic the whole thing was named for was pairing: you fought in sixes, turn by turn, and your character's other half was the point of her. Square Enix published it in partnership with Animate, which is an anime merchandise retailer and not a games company. Development was by a studio called EVOLVE. The original setting was written by Nao Shiramoto and the music came from Keiichi Okabe, who also scored Nier.

The calendar is tight and completely documented. Announced on 25 October 2022, pre-registration from 8 November, an advance test in December, launch on 16 February 2023. The closure notice came on 17 May 2024, and at eight in the evening on 23 July the servers stopped, one year and five months after opening. It was Japanese only, on the phone and later on the stage, so nothing here was ever mine to miss. I found it on a list of Japanese services that had gone dark. That is the route almost everything takes to this site now.

~ the record ~

~ the stage and the server ~

There were two theater productions. The first ran at the Sunshine Theatre in Tokyo from 16 to 25 June 2023, four months after the game opened. The second, billed as Towa Tsugai II, ran at the Otemachi Mitsui Hall from 18 July 2024.

Its closing performance was on 23 July. The servers shut down at 20:00 the same day. Somebody at Square Enix lined up the last curtain and the last login to the hour, and whether that was a kindness or a scheduling accident, it is the single best fact about this game.

~ three endings ~

On the evening the game died, a web community called Towa Tsugai Fans opened in its place, built and operated by a company called Gaudiy rather than by the publisher. What it offered was the rest of the story, which Square Enix released there in full voice, episode by episode, until the last one went up on 1 January 2025.

Two weeks later, on 15 January, the site announced its own migration. Towa Tsugai Fans closed on 28 February 2025, and on 1 March the same community came back as Towafan with the licensed material removed. User accounts and everything people had posted carried over intact. The Towa Tsugai content itself did not, so what remained was a forum about a game you could no longer read. It announced its end on 1 August 2025 and switched off on 10 September.

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