Uta Macross Smartphone Deculture

» see uta-macross.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Macross has been about singing since 1982, when its premise was that a pop song could stop a war, so a rhythm game was always sitting there waiting to be made. DeNA finally made it and shipped it on 3 August 2017. Four lanes of notes came down the screen and you tapped them. Behind the notes the franchise's singers performed in 3D against backgrounds that reproduced the concert scenes from the anime, with the choreography and freshly recorded dialogue. It was the first rhythm game the franchise had ever had, which for a property whose entire identity is music is a long time to wait.

It ran four years and eleven months. DeNA posted the end on 27 April 2022 and closed the service at 15:00 on 28 June, with no reason given, which is the standard courtesy and the standard silence. The songs went with it. That is the particular problem with a licensed music game. The thing you were there for is the asset the operator has the least right to leave lying around after the lights go off.

Most graves end there. This one has a second half, and the second half started on 10 September 2026 at eight in the evening, when a crowdfunding campaign opened to rebuild the game as an offline product you buy once.

~ the chronicle ~

~ 155,071,800 yen ~

The target was thirty million yen. It cleared in about an hour. Inside seventy-two hours the campaign had passed a hundred million from more than three thousand backers, and as this is written, with a week left on the clock, the counter reads 155,071,800 yen from 4,918 people against a next marker of a hundred and eighty million. The stretch goals read like a list of everything the original could not afford to be. Seventy-five million unlocked console development. A hundred million bought new music outright.

The plan is a spring 2027 release on Steam and on both phone stores, priced at nothing announced yet. AUGUST is publishing, and Automaton reports that development sits with xeen, the studio that built the service version in the first place.

~ what the rebuild takes out ~

Read the feature list and it is mostly subtraction. The stamina bar is gone and so is paid spending. The rarity gacha survives but has been turned into a box type that you pull for free, without limit, which is a sentence no commercial director could have signed off on in 2017 and is the entire proposition in 2026. The base package carries fifty songs, with the rest coming as downloadable content and more than a thousand four-star plates in the box. They added keyboard and mouse support.

Macross barely left Japan for decades. A rights tangle between Big West and Harmony Gold kept almost everything after the first series off foreign shelves until the two sides settled in 2021, which is why a franchise this large has spent forty years being something most of the world heard about secondhand. The game died in 2022 and I never had a reasonable path to it. The thing being built now goes on Steam, which is the first address in this entire story that I could actually walk up to.

None of which resurrects what closed. The 2017 service is dead and its servers are gone, and what arrives in spring 2027 will be another product carrying the same songs. Both things stay true at once. This is the only grave on the site whose sequel has a funding page you can refresh.

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