It barely lasted pass 1st anniversary and its shutting down. Wow, Aniplex, I'm still stunned at the news. Pretty scummy for them to still allow purchases up to Sept. 10. Guess we're not getting Arc 2, Spirit Enhancements or Little Kyubey. This hurts and I actually enjoyed this game.
The closure hurts me more than most gacha games would because I genuinely liked the characters and story. I invested so much in the lore of the world, so knowing that the story isn't finished just yet and that there's more to come (in JP) that we'll never get is painful. I know it might seem excessive, but this was the first thought I had when waking up today. I'm still disappointed at the news.
I'm beginning to think if lack of revenue isn't the only reason they're shutting down the servers. I noticed that Aniplex has Princess Connect licensed for BD release, so maybe they saw how popular the anime was with mainstream people (it ranked very high) and took it upon themselves to handle the English localization of the game and diverted the resources from Magia Record over to that. It just seems strange that MR suddenly got the axe out of nowhere, especially after the year+ of increased pace to catch NA up to Japan (of which they were very close in accomplishing). I legitimately feel blindsided about it. Normally you can kind of see a gacha closure coming, but not here. Sure we had the strange way they handled Iroha's Birthday and the missing Iroha + Yachiyo login story, but I just contributed that to strain on the team due to the pandemic. I guess that wasn't the case after all.
So yeah, I'm still mad. While I got a lot of enjoyment out of the game, I just hate that I won't get the whole story now because of this. It's not so much the money spent, I just regret invest the time into getting to know the world/characters, because it just makes everything more difficult to accept. :(
Edit:
I noticed a lot of people on Reddit jumping ship to the JP version. I just don't understand that thought process at all. In addition to not being able to understand all of the UI and story content, they're basically "thanking" the people behind the NA closure by bolstering the JP download numbers (and some will likely purchase currency to as well). If a company can't be bothered to support our version of a game (yes, while MR wasn't pulling in FGO/Dokkan/etc. numbers, it was still stable enough) and a server I'm playing on suddenly dies, the last thing I want to do is that (as well as the whole "starting from scratch" thing). Like, just the thought of downloading and starting the JP version makes me sick to my stomach, there's just no way.
