Wonder Flick

» see wonderflick.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Level-5 unveiled Wonder Flick at a company event on 26 August 2013 as the first title under a banner it called Uniplay. The pitch was that one save file would follow you from a phone to a living room console and back, which in 2013 was a thing companies talked about constantly and shipped almost never. Akihiro Hino directed and produced. Nobuo Uematsu wrote the music, and that detail is what made people outside Japan look up.

Registration opened on iOS on 14 December 2013 and on Android on Christmas Day. The Android build went live on 8 January 2014 and iOS followed a month later. It went badly. The servers could not carry the load the pre-registration numbers had promised, and it shipped full of bugs. Hino apologized publicly for the state of it rather than waiting for things to settle.

Level-5 spent most of 2014 rebuilding it and relaunched in August as Wonder Flick R, version 2.00, with housing and a reworked structure. That bought roughly a year. On 11 May 2015 the company announced the service would end, and on 14 September 2015 at 16:00 Japan time it did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ seven platforms ~

The announcement named phones plus the Wii U, the PlayStation Vita, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Seven places to play one game. Two of them ever got it, both of them phones, and every console version was still listed as upcoming when the shutdown notice went out.

Uniplay itself did not survive the game either, though it was rolled forward rather than abandoned. Level-5 folded the idea into an account system called LEVEL5 ID and pointed Wonder Flick players at it, promising that their adventurer license rank would unlock bonuses in whatever shipped next. The cross-platform dream became a loyalty card.

~ the second launch ~

Wonder Flick R is the interesting half of this. Most studios in that position quietly let the thing rot or push a patch and hope. Level-5 took the game off the field, spent seven months on it and put it back out in August 2014 under a new name with a letter on the end, as though the first attempt had been a rehearsal.

It worked well enough to pass three million downloads, which the site celebrated with a gold badge on the front page. It never worked well enough to keep the servers worth running. The gap between those two sentences is where most live-service games end up, usually without having been given a second launch at all.

~ four months of refunds ~

The wind-down was unusually careful and it is documented to the hour. Sales of Fairy Coins and the character-remake tickets stopped on 15 June 2015 at 16:00. On 13 July at 16:00 the coins and tickets could no longer be spent at all, and the window to claim money back on unspent balances opened. That window closed at 16:00 on 14 September, at the same moment the service did. Four months from the notice, with the cash register turned off first.

Today wonderflick.jp still resolves and still forwards to a product page on Level-5's own site, eleven years on. The page is three screenshots of the closing notice, and the files are named for the date it happened: image01_150914.jpg. Level-5 games did reach me, localized and sold in boxes, which is why this one stands out. Hino shipped one game that asked for a Japanese phone number and a Japanese store account, and that is as close as it ever got.

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