World Dai Star: Yume no Stellarium

» see wds-stellarium.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

World Dai Star is a Bandai Namco Filmworks project about girls who act on stage. The fiction is built out of 劇団, repertory theatre companies, each with a house and a reputation. Sirius keeps a theatre in Asakusa, while Ginga-za, the big name in Taito ward, holds its company to a discipline the smaller troupes cannot afford. Eden is a tiny outfit halfway through an internal collapse that has already cost it its audience. The anime came first. The game came second, and it was called Yume no Stellarium, which players shortened to Yumesute.

Stage-acting fiction is a Japanese idiom that does not travel. Turkey has theatre and Turkey has teen drama, but it has no genre in which the audience is expected to know what a troupe's reputation in a particular ward of Tokyo means, and no shelf for it. Nothing about Yumesute was hidden from me. It was simply written for a reader I am not.

KMS, Inc. built and ran it out of an office on the fifteenth floor of Tennoz First Tower in Shinagawa. It opened on 26 July 2023 as a free rhythm game with item billing, and it had one design decision worth remembering: if your life bar emptied mid-song the song kept playing. You did not get thrown out. There was an auto-play mode on top of that, so a player with no time and no reflexes could still move through the troupe story and take photographs of the cast at fixed locations around the map. None of the failure states a rhythm game normally runs on were switched on here.

On 17 July 2026 the operator posted the shutdown notice and stopped selling the paid currency at 15:00 the same day. Producer Hiroyuki Kato put a message on X headed 大変重要なお知らせ, a very important announcement. The timing is what sticks: the third anniversary fell on 26 July, nine days later. Whatever decision produced that notice was made close enough to the date that somebody had to choose between posting it before the anniversary or after, and they posted it before.

~ the chronicle ~

~ nine days short ~

The service ended on 29 September 2026. The paid jewels stopped working at 14:00 and the final maintenance was scheduled to finish at 15:00, a gap that exists only because the refund screen had to be reachable after the game itself was not. Three years, two months and three days from launch.

~ what the law made them do ~

Japan treats a prepaid in-game currency as a prepaid payment instrument, and article 20 paragraph 1 of the Payment Services Act obliges the issuer to refund the unused balance when it stops honoring it. So the closing notice is not a farewell letter. It is a legal instrument. KMS named itself as the issuer, named 劇ジュエル as the instrument, opened a claim window from 29 September 2026 at 14:00 to 25 December 2026 at 13:59, and committed to paying out by bank transfer through GMO Payment Gateway starting 4 January 2027, with the transfer fees on the company.

Free jewels and spent jewels were both excluded. So was anyone who had used the in-app "delete user" button, because the company could no longer confirm who they were, and the notice says so plainly rather than hiding it. Most of the press summaries printed the deadline as 29 December at 23:59. The operator's own page says 25 December at 13:59, and the operator's own page is the one that governs.

~ the attic ~

The game's oddest feature arrived on April Fool's Day as a mode called ヤネウラ, the attic. It served charts that had been pulled for bugs, in their broken state, alongside harder versions of normal songs. A rhythm game publishing its own mistakes as a playable joke is not a thing most operators would sign off on. It is the kind of gesture a team makes when it has stopped being embarrassed in front of its own players.

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