A "joy and mourning".
Three months after the announcement of the discontinuation, the six-and-a-half-year operation of "Death Alice" has officially come to an end.
Unlike most long-running games, which tend to reach the end of their life cycle in an atmosphere of silence or misery, Dead Alice has been a big hit in the last few months.
First, a final event called "This is the Death of Alice of Death" was launched, calling on new and old players to enter the pit and return to the pit to "participate in the grand event".
Under the premise that the in-game recharge channel has been closed, the game provides a large number of resources for players to "take a cool" every day, except for some linkage characters, all kinds of limited and non-limited characters in the game can be collected in a few days;
Before the service, "what is lacking and what is given" nearly 100 gacha every day
At this time, there are still nearly three months before the game is officially closed, which is equivalent to purely for players to "play for nothing".
On December 26, "Dead Alice" released the seventh chapter "Desire Chapter", which represents the true ending of the plot, containing probably the most text content and animations in the game's six years of operation, drawing a close to the story.
The premise for players to play this chapter, in addition to clearing the previous story, also requires all members of the guild (full 15 people) to go online at the same time and agree to open the final chapter together to defeat the final boss together.
But "full guild" is not a necessary condition, in other words, you can also set up a single guild to experience the plot like the player on the right (from Grape Fanta under Station B @ Stamping Machine)
After defeating the final boss and watching the ending, the player will no longer be able to use most of the game's features, and the login page will reveal a tombstone with the player's ranking and former nickname engraved on it.
At noon on January 15th, "Death Alice" ushered in the last data update before the shutdown, and from now on, players can log in to this APP without an Internet connection, watch the plot they have cleared, the characters collected, and all the PV animations over the years, and you can also see the tombstones of other players and the epitaphs they left behind.
A total of 31,858 players accompanied the game to the end
When you exit the game at this time, you can see that even the app's icon has become a tombstone.
↑ I have a grave in my phone
1
Looking back on the six years of operation of "Death Alice", it is appropriate to describe it as "the peak of appearance".
In 2017, with the great success of "NieR: Automata", its producer Taro Yokoo became more and more well-known for his unique creative style.
Yokoo Taro who always likes to show off his weird clothes.
As he has shown in the series of works "Nier" and "Cavalry on Dragon's Back", Yokoo Taro is quite adept at portraying "adult fairy tales", in addition to adding "erotic" elements to the game, he always cruelly plays with the fate of the characters, so that the story unfolds in an unusually twisted direction, and the unexpected "meta element" is also a common part of his works.
But it is precisely because of this that players are able to get a unique gaming experience from his works.
"NieR: Automata" was in the limelight, and it successfully brought attention to "Death Alice", which was also the original work and creative director of Taro Yokoo, who started with the "dark, twisted, and worst adult language" as a publicity stunt, which can be said to be perfectly in line with people's expectations for "Yokoo Taro's work" at this time.
On the other hand, the art style of "Death Alice" and the dynamic vertical painting of the characters are still delicate and delicate today, with different styles and high recognition, which was even more amazing back then.
In addition, the game announced that it would be linked with "NieR: Automata" before the server was launched, and it was claimed that the first ten consecutive games of the game could be reset by players until they were satisfied, eliminating the hard work of "brushing the beginning" (which was still rare at the time)...... has greatly raised the expectations of players for this mobile game.
In later operations, "Death Alice" also linked with many works, including "Lelouch the Rebel", "Rose Girl" and even DC ......
But on the day of the opening of the server, "Death Alice" did not open smoothly, or in other words, it could only be opened a little.
Maybe it's because the number of players from around the world exceeds the server's expectations, or because the "unlimited 10 times before entering the game" adds an additional burden to data transmission, or because it is a popular game that has been extorted by a DDOS attack...... In short, on the day of the scheduled launch, Death Alice was mired in endless maintenance, and the window of time for players to successfully enter the game was less than half an hour.
In the face of this embarrassing situation, the game operator itself also left a lot of fun to operate, such as after releasing several announcements that "scheduled maintenance until X o'clock will be launched" but broke its promise, it was changed to "Preview Notice" such as "We will notify X o'clock at X o'clock whether the service can be opened", and begging players to avoid "staggered play" during popular times such as 12 o'clock, 17 o'clock, and 20 o'clock.
This situation of "opening the server but not fully opening" and stopping the service for maintenance almost all day lasted for nearly ten days, and then players were gradually able to enter the game normally.
Today, this is obviously an out-and-out operational accident, and it is enough to make a game that is still in its infancy directly declare "death", but at the time, this service farce only made "Death Alice" even more famous.
Not only has it triggered an Internet carnival in Japan, all kinds of memes have emerged endlessly, but it has also become a phenomenal topic on social networks in China, not only are various game groups discussing this matter, but even ordinary passers-by netizens know that "there is a game that is so popular that it can't be served".
This is why to this day, when hearing the news of the game's discontinuation, many people still think of the day when "Death Alice" was launched.
2
In the more than six years since then, "Death Alice" has indeed not attracted more attention than when it was launched.
To a large extent, this is due to the fact that the actual gameplay of the game and the original promotional direction are a bit "mismatched".
In most people's expectations, "Death Alice" will be a game similar to FGO's "heavy story, light gameplay", but the fact is the opposite: the performance of the story plot in the game is often only a few lines of text, and the lines are obscure, and the specific content is made up by the player's own brain;
The plot text often highlights a "seems to have been said but it seems not to have been said"
The core of the game's gameplay is Granblue Fantasy-style heavy cultivation and online fighting, and the most unique and interesting content is the 15v15 real-time grand guild battle, which can even allow players to experience a bit of the excitement of large-scale MMO battles in "Paper Man Collision".
Station B user @MiguMigu, recorded a video of the Great Guild War
It is not difficult to understand why the final chapter of the game requires that "all members of the guild be online at the same time".
This model also dooms the player structure of Dead Alice to be dominated by heavy players who are condensed into many small groups, and there are few shallow users who only care about the plot and characters and are active on social media.
Because of the popularity of the server, many raiders and second creation groups have been eyeing this piece of sweetness from the beginning, rushing to establish relevant information media, strategy centers and fandom communities, but in less than a year, few people in these places have maintained and updated.
The stark gap in popularity, coupled with the closure of the international server after a few years of operation, has led many people to have the impression that "Death Alice will be cold soon after the service is opened", but in terms of the performance of the Japanese server, as a game with low development and operating costs, "Death Alice", which can still break into the top 50 of the Japanese best-selling list from time to time in the sixth year of operation, is still alive and well than many of its peers.
Even when the game announced that it was going to be suspended, many remaining players were still surprised, thinking that there were still many people playing in the game and characters were also coming out, and it was not to the point of suspending the service at all.
In this regard, the producer of the game gave a statement to the effect that he had promised Taro Yokoo to give "Death Alice" a complete ending, and that the game could certainly control costs and balance revenue in exchange for a longer operation, but at the end of that road, it would be difficult to have the resources to do a decent ending, so it was better to choose such an appropriate time to draw a satisfactory end for the game that would satisfy the producers themselves.
In an earlier interview, the production team of "Death Alice" has also repeatedly expressed that they are very satisfied with their work, the game got a fairly small investment budget at the beginning, and the end of development has reached the point of exhaustion, and they did not expect to usher in such glory when the server was launched, and it has long exceeded expectations if it can operate for more than five years - most of the mobile games published by SE have not been in operation for more than 9 months, and surviving this period is their original goal.
As a result, they did hold a "grand funeral" for Death Alice, and tried their best to leave everything they could to the players.
After the game turns into a "grave pack", the player can also read the last words left by the characters
3
Bringing things that most developers would keep silent about on the table, or even putting them in the game to make jokes, is actually one of the features of Dead Alice.
In the game's fifth year of operation, the theme of the anniversary event was "Poverty and Thanksgiving", and the words of the game's characters said, "Although the budget has been reduced, the anniversary will still be held luxuriously", which now seems to be somewhat hinting at the suspension of the service for the coming year.
The annual meeting cannot be stopped
So although there is not much text content about the plot in the game, it does still reflect a little "yokoo flavor".
This is also reflected in the ending of the game.
As everyone knows from the beginning of the game, the characters in the game are all morbid characters based on fairy tale characters but with twisted personalities - the violent Little Red Riding Hood, the shaking M Kaguya, the sweary Cinderella, and the Gretel who puts her sister's head in a birdcage and pretends to be her sister (from Grimm's fairy tale "Candy House")...... These characters slaughter all kinds of monsters in order to resurrect the author who created them and thus rewrite their fate.
As some speculations at the time, the subsequent plot of the game revealed that these characters were not really from fairy tales, but from ordinary people who had suffered various misfortunes in reality and had distorted personalities...... It can be said that it is quite a story template that fits the bad taste of Yokoo.
Dark reality version of "Taketori Monogatari"
When the operation of the international server and the traditional Chinese server were closed first, the development team also prepared an "ending" for the game - Alice, as the game board girl, woke up at the desk in the classroom and greeted the classmates who greeted her at the door, everything seemed to be just a dream.
The classic nihilistic "dream ending"
Everyone knows that this is because of "practical reasons" and hastily prepared perfunctory endings, but it is unexpectedly in line with the multi-ending tradition of "Nier" and "Cavalry on Dragon's Back".
The true ending ushered in in the Japanese server reveals the rope that players have been using to summon characters, and the other end is actually the final boss of the game, which absorbs the endless greed of players in the real world through gacha, so as to erode the world in which the characters live, and manipulate their fate, and if you really like these characters and want to change their fate, you have to "destroy" the game with the guild members, so that our world can no longer affect it- That's why once you beat the final chapter, you won't be able to use most of the game's features.
It's also similar to the design in NieR: Automata that sacrifices one's own save to help other players beat the level.
Yokoo Taro said in an interview that this represents some of his reflections on "social mobile games", and it is also the worldview and ending that have been set from the beginning.
Regardless of whether there is some contradiction between this "original intention" and the actual gameplay of "Heavy Krypton and Heavy Liver", at least at the level of story and operation, "Dead Alice" has become a rare work in the history of mobile games with a "beginning and an end".
Six years is not a long time, as many players have left the "epitaph" to the development and operation staff and former companions: hard work, this companionship will become a precious memory in my life.
epilogue
In 2020, Station B announced that it had obtained the agency rights for the simplified Chinese version of the work and named it "Alice of Heart Sin", opened the reservation, established a homepage, and released a message video from producer Taro Yokoo.
At this time, it has been 3 years since the game was launched, but as mentioned before, "Death Alice" also has an unexpected topic and popularity in China, and it can be said to be the most high-profile agency game between FGO and "Horse Racing Girl".
And then...... And then there is no then.,Under the influence of factors such as the suspension of the version number and the conceivable localization difficulty of the game itself,The simplified Chinese server has not been able to get any advancement.
The game's official account relied on greetings, sweepstakes, and posting love packets to "run a non-existent game" for two years, and finally fell silent at the end of 2022;
At the same time, the traditional Chinese service of Xiaomeng Technology's "Death Alice" was suspended.
With the official closure of the Japanese server, in addition to the "grave" left in the player's mobile phone, the home page of the simplified Chinese server, which is still "pre-ordered", has finally become another "cyber tablet" of "Death Alice".