There was a short-lived Japanese mobile game which was marketed as a MMORPG game that was shutdown 2 months after its initial release (which is an extremely short lifespan for an MMORPG), and since there weren't any English articles that cover this game, I will be writing about what happened to this game, but before that, if you don't know anything about this game, I highly recommend watching some videos covering this game before explaining it to you.
Alright then, let me explain to you what kind of game is this.
Yokai Planet Clarice (妖怪惑星クラリス) was a short-lived free-to-play mobile game originally scheduled to release in late May 2017, but was delayed to December 2017, made by the Japanese company Kola Entertainment for iOS and Android devices. It had an interesting concept of an planet whose human population are infected by a DNA virus and they were called "Yokai" by the humans on Earth, preventing them from going back to the earth.
The game's battle system consisted of Puzzles and Dragons-style puzzles in which you had to randomly use your characters and swipe the correct tiles to fight against enemies, and despite that, the developers are usually generous to the players, which is unusual for a MMORPG game, and allowed them to write scenarios in the game, and some of the game's scenarios were written by the others who were friendly to the players as well.
That's all I have to explain about this game is for those who didn't know about it, and here's how it began.
The Twitter account for the game has been created in February 2017, with weird Japanese texts and interesting character designs, and with the intent that the game will be released in May of the same year. The character designs were interesting and creepy at the same time, and the storyline, which sounded cool on paper, but not for some players.
The videos promoting this game were uploaded on both YouTube (which was taken down along with the channel itself) and Niconico, and the developers put out a poll suggesting the name of the one of the characters, and their Twitter community manager Kola (コラ), notorious for her horrible Japanese writing and unfamiliar with Japanese internet culture, had been scolded by the company themselves, posting an apology tweet and never learned her lesson, as she continued to create Twitter polls in the style of the monster with a obscure name.
For example, there was a female character with a rose for her head, donning a kimono was given a weird name and another character that resembles Pikotaro with his head being a cat, whose name was incomprehensible to the point I have a hard time pronouncing it. What the hell was their Twitter community manager thinking? The game became a meme of itself, and the characters were merely plagiarized, as its mascot character's face was stolen from another game character.
However, this game was scheduled to be released in May 2017, but was delayed to June and the closed beta test began on August of the same year, which unfortunately caused an incident in which there was a mistake with the email, leaking their email addresses to the closed beta testers, thus giving the developer a negative reputation. Eventually, the game was finally released in December 2017 for both iOS and Android devices.
However, it was released contrary to what the users had expected, and it gained positive reviews for allowing scenarios written by the players, being generous to the players and their unique gacha system, but failed to attract other players and however only attracted a few number of players. Upon its release, one of the characters have their name change and people were skeptical.
In the game, players were usually said to be together with an another if they're in the same server, and interacted with each other from day one, and there's an NPC named Clarice, in which the player can talk to her and go on quests through her, but there's an option on the menu, so they don't have to go through her. There's nothing else on the map, except that there are buttons you can touch at the bottom on the screen.
Not only that, there were three types of chat tabs in this game, unlike many other MMOs, which offers more than three chat tabs. The world chat was always accessible from any location the player is in no matter what quest they are in, and the field chat doesn't keep any logs and is barely used in the game. The management chat allowed you to directly communicate with the developers, in which one player asked them to give them diamonds for their birthday and afterwards, many players begged for free diamonds from them.
However, the developer was overly sensitive and put the word "運営(Unei)" as banned words in the game, so the players had no choice to write the word in romaji "UNEI". In addition to that, the game's main currencies are diamonds and coins, in which the former is a premium currency and can be exchanged for the latter in order to buy story quests and premium scenarios, which sounds like a pay to win moment. However, the premium currency can be obtained through login bonuses and as rewards for clearing quests, but free diamonds can't be exchanged for coins.
Although there were arguments, the developer somehow managed to gain a small number of audience and continued to operate the game, but were unprofessional due to the players pointing out a lack of salesmanship, as they were generous to the players by eliminating pay to win elements, which sounded like a good choice, and according to their Niconico livestream, the company's name was derived from the phrase "I love Koalas (コアラが大好き)" and the name of "Clarice" was derived from the main character of Silence of the Lambs, and they even announced a crowdfunding campaign, whose original video was uploaded on both YouTube and Niconico, featuring a young woman, whose face was censored by using a character from the game itself, who talked about the project, which according to her, started in 2015, and she showed us her plans on how could the game be improved.
Sadly, this game only lasted for two months, as they announced on Twitter that it was shutdown in February 23rd, 2018, with their servers and website shutting down in less than a hour, without a notice from the developers about the game shutting down, in which some of the game's writers declared that they didn't know about the shutdown and have asked the developer about their salaries but didn't get a response from them, and combined with the crowdfunding campaign, suspicion of the company themselves running away with the money and them being scammers arose.
Some of the staff were outraged and the players as well, because one of them asked for refunds from them. Around that time, there was a crowdfunding campaign for the game on CAMPFIRE (a Japanese crowdfunding site) to develop new features for the game, which exceeded its goal of 100,000 yen (equivalent to 935 USD and 761 euros at the time of the game's shutdown in 2018, in which as of modifying this article in 2023, is equal to approximately 684 USD and 630 euros), and they weren't informed about the shutdown and were outraged at the situation, and damage was already done, as they weren't any notice about in-app purchase refunds, and there were plans to revive the game on Twitter, but the tweet was later deleted in less than an hour.
The reason why this game was suddenly shutdown was because the employees involved in the project quit the company, making it difficult for them to operate the game on their own and they'll delete the crowdfunding page on CAMPFIRE and refund the money to the backers.
2 days later, one of the writers' salaries were paid and in less than a week, the money the backers spent on the crowdfunding campaign was eventually refunded, thus ending the CAMPFIRE incident. 2 weeks later, Yokai Planet Clarice was eventually delisted on Google Play and the iOS App Store. A few months later, on July 2018, a company called KBK Labo got the intellectual property rights of the game and took over its Twitter account through a transfer but was cancelled and deleted the Twitter account on January 2019, thus ending this game as a whole.
That's all I have to say about this game. If you have any more information about this game, let me know in the comments.
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