Mobile game locks your account after you finish

SINoALICE’s final chapter launched for Taiwanese players earlier today, and upon completing it discovered that they were permanently locked out.

SINoALICE, a semi-popular phone game from the creators of NieR: Automata and Drakengard, (most notably, Yoko Taro) announced that players who clear Verse 10, the final story content for the game, will be forced out of the game and unable to log back in.

Some context: the NieR series is famous for including these “final” story requirements of deleting your data. For example, in NieR: Replicant and Automata, players would have to delete their entire save file, and all other save files just to experience the “true ending”. There are story reasons for this, so we won’t get into spoilers, but needless to say it is very emotional and heartbreaking.

SINoALICE appears to be taking the same route (thanks, TheGamer!) The tragic story of storybook heroes and heroines who have lost their minds and their purpose was praised for its engaging stories, but the actual gameplay aspect left a lot to be desired. It is a “gacha” game, which means that players need to spend real money to achieve any sort of significant progress in the game.

SINoALICE tells the tale of storybook heroines like Cinderella and Alice, who must kill others in order to survive a harsh and unforgiving world. Picture: Square Enix

Released in Japan in 2017 and worldwide in 2020, SINoALICE has had a relatively good run, as far as gacha games go. Most gacha games live to only be a year or two old before servers are shut down due to a lack of interest. Only a handful of gacha games, like Puzzles and Dragons or Final Fantasy Dissidia: Opera Omnia attain popularity great enough to last longer.

The final chapter was released for Taiwanese players today, since the Taiwan servers for SINoALICE are shutting down next month — and Yoko Taro, director of these games, decided to send them off in the only way he knows how. Giving them the final bit of story content and then locking their accounts entirely, mimicking the NieR games. Once players clear Verse 10, the game forcibly logs them out and then prevents them from logging in.

In other gaming news, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer called the metaverse “a poorly made video game” when speaking to a crowd of attendees at the Tech Live 2022 conference, and a player named Joe Biden — as in, the president of the United States — is clearing out the competition in online Guilty Gear tournaments.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.