Back in May, Akatsuki Games abruptly announced that the free-to-play RPG Tribe Nine will be prematurely shut down on November 27. This news came only three months after the game launched and exceeded 10 million downloads worldwide. In response, the creator of the franchise’s original concept – Too Kyo Games’ head Kazutaka Kodaka, established Neoneon Tribe – an independent group dedicated to continuing and completing the story.
Co-founded alongside Tribe Nine’s former producer Shuhei Yamaguchi and scenario writer Katsunori Suginaka, Neoneon Tribe has received permission from Akatsuki Games (who still owns the IP) to publish a non-profit, unofficial doujin series depicting the rest of the Tribe Nine’s story. This is quite an unprecedented move, especially given that Kodaka and his team won’t be earning a dime from the project – neither through direct readership nor through merch. AUTOMATON recently interviewed Neoneon Tribe’s founders to find out more about why they’re volunteering to do this.
While Kokada created the original concept and characters of the Tribe Nine multimedia franchise (which also has an anime from 2022), he was not directly involved in the development of Akatsuki Game’s’ F2P title. Still, the sudden EoS announcement was disappointing enough for him to take matters into his own hands.
“The scenario was handled by Akatsuki Games, I personally had very little to do with it. I made sure to avoid promoting Tribe Nine in a way that would suggest I was the original creator, since that would overshadow the actual development team. I supported the project, but kept a distance. That said, the game itself looked really entertaining, and I was honestly planning to whale on it after I was done working on The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.
But then came the shutdown notice, which I felt was a shame. As you’d expect, players started telling me, “You created it, so do something!” While I do remember thinking If you’re going to start a story, you should see it through to the end, I knew Akatsuki was in no position to do so. At the same time, I hated the idea of the worldbuilding and characters I created being reduced to “that game that lasted three months.” I also didn’t want fans left with only disappointment from an incomplete story.
So, with Too Kyo Games being a smaller studio with more freedom and leeway, we decided to take Akatsuki Games’ scenario and see it through to completion. That was the only path left. And, well, as a president of a game company, I felt it would be interesting to work on something like this for free.”
Yamaguchi, who quit Akatsuki Games after Tribe Nine’s discontinuation was announced, likewise felt it was a shame for the game to be cut short, particularly as this lowered the reputation of the franchise as a whole.
“I feel that Tribe Nine has tremendous potential, and I think the anime turned out to be something really exciting. That’s why, to be honest, I can’t quite accept how it’s currently being evaluated. There were so many characters planned to appear in the game down the line, and so many storylines we had prepared—and yet, it’s scheduled to end before any of that gets shown. So I feel like the work as a whole hasn’t really been given the evaluation it deserves.”
By launching Neoneon Tribe, Kodaka, Yamaguchi and Suginaka hope to “rewrite” Tribe Nine’s unfortunate history. As Kodaka puts it, “In terms of my own legacy, having Tribe Nine remembered only as “that game that shut down after three months” would be incredibly frustrating. I want to give the whole ordeal a conclusion along the lines of, “Even after the shutdown, the creators themselves wrote the end of the story, published it, and became legends.” That would be a kind of personal reward for me, almost like a medal of honor. I’m honestly not looking at it from a business owner’s perspective at all.
Tribe Nine is available for free on PC (Steam), iOS and Android until November 27. The members of Neoneon Tribe encourage fans to play through all story chapters while the game is still available, as their doujin work will continue from where the game left off.
