Jan 272025
We’ve talked about Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy and the Polar Night Liberator a few times now, even though it’s a game I had little interest in.
Announced during a live stream as a mainline Atelier entry despite being a free-to-play gacha game, it’s been somewhat controversial among fans.
Last January it came to the west… but the curse of mobile games has struck once again, as they announced today that the global version of Atelier Resleriana is shutting down on March 28.
This is one of the biggest drawbacks of these games (besides all the things I hate about the gacha game structure). Most of them shut down, sometimes quite fast, and then you can never play them again. Only a rare handful of mobile games get replaced by an offline version to let fans play what content already existed, while the rest just vanish forever.
At least with this one, the Japanese version isn’t shutting down yet, so fans could experience the story through fan translations. Still, its end will eventually come as well.
I wasn’t interested in Atelier Resleriana in the first place, but it must be disappointing to fans invested in the story, not to mention any who have spent money on its gacha.
Fortunately, this shouldn’t have any affect on Atelier Resleriana: The Red Alchemist & the White Guardian, the upcoming offline, non-gacha game set in the same universe. That one I am interested in, so here’s hoping it’s still on track.
How do you feel about the shutdown of Atelier Resleriana?
I agree, creating a game to only be played online means that a lot of gamers will only ever know it for a short period of time, and will never be able to experience or preserve it for the future beyond youtube videos. The games industry already has issues about preserving games (remember KH1 remaster had to be rebuilt from scratch because they lost the source code???) and games that are specifically designed to be live services like this with no real means of preservation will always fall to the wayside. It makes games a much less stable form of art than most other kinds of media, due to the reliance on specific kinds of technology and infrastructure just to run at often-basic levels, and the need to invest further money if they do want to have some kind of preservation system.
This got very philosophical for a game series and individual game I otherwise have no interest in lol.
It’s also the sort of game that can easily just never have a completed story. I’m glad that with KH Dark Road, they released the story finale offline.