{"id":51458,"date":"2025-08-28T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/?p=51458"},"modified":"2025-12-23T14:00:55","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T05:00:55","slug":"tribe-nines-creators-didnt-want-the-game-to-go-down-in-history-as-that-project-that-flopped-in-three-months-which-is-why-theyre-working-for-free-to-comple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/news\/tribe-nines-creators-didnt-want-the-game-to-go-down-in-history-as-that-project-that-flopped-in-three-months-which-is-why-theyre-working-for-free-to-comple\/","title":{"rendered":"Tribe Nine\u2019s creators didn\u2019t want the game to go down in history as \u201cthat project that flopped in three months,\u201d which is why they\u2019re working for free to complete the story\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back in May, Akatsuki Games abruptly announced that the free-to-play RPG Tribe Nine <\/strong>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\u2019s original concept \u2013 Too Kyo Games\u2019 head Kazutaka Kodaka, established Neoneon Tribe<\/strong> \u2013 an independent group dedicated to continuing and completing the story.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Co-founded alongside Tribe Nine\u2019s 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\u2019t be earning a dime from the project \u2013 neither through direct readership nor through merch. AUTOMATON recently interviewed Neoneon Tribe\u2019s founders to find out more about why they\u2019re volunteering to do this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Tribe<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While Kodaka 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\u00a0development of Akatsuki Game\u2019<\/s>s\u2019 F2P title.\u00a0 Still, the sudden EoS announcement was disappointing enough for him to take matters into his own hands.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe 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\u2019d expect, players started telling me, \u201cYou created it, so do something!\u201d While I do remember thinking If you\u2019re going to start a story, you should see it through to the end<\/em>, 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 \u201cthat game that lasted three months.\u201d I also didn\u2019t 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\u2019 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yamaguchi, who quit Akatsuki Games after Tribe Nine\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI feel that Tribe Nine has tremendous potential, and I think the anime turned out to be something really exciting. That\u2019s why, to be honest, I can\u2019t quite accept how it\u2019s currently being evaluated. There were so many characters planned to appear in the game down the line, and so many storylines we had prepared\u2014and yet, it\u2019s scheduled to end before any of that gets shown. So I feel like the work as a whole hasn\u2019t really been given the evaluation it deserves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By launching Neoneon Tribe, Kodaka, Yamaguchi and Suginaka hope to \u201crewrite\u201d Tribe Nine\u2019s unfortunate history. As Kodaka puts it, \u201cIn terms of my own legacy, having Tribe Nine remembered only as \u201cthat game that shut down after three months\u201d would be incredibly frustrating. I want to give the whole ordeal a conclusion along the lines of, \u201cEven after the shutdown, the creators themselves wrote the end of the story, published it, and became legends.\u201d That would be a kind of personal reward for me, almost like a medal of honor. I\u2019m honestly not looking at it from a business owner’s perspective at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tribe Nine is available for free on PC (Steam<\/a>), iOS and Android until November 27. The members of Neoneon Tribe<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the creator of the Tribe Nine transmedia franchise, Kazutaka Kodaka isn’t happy about the RPG adaptation being remembered as a flop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":51462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_gspb_post_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-51458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-news","tag-japan-related-news"],"blocksy_meta":[],"yoast_head":"\nTribe Nine\u2019s creators didn\u2019t want the game to go down in history as \u201cthat project that flopped in three months,\u201d which is why they\u2019re working for free to complete the story\u00a0 - AUTOMATON WEST<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As the creator of the Tribe Nine transmedia franchise, Kazutaka Kodaka isn't happy about the RPG adaptation being remembered as a flop.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/news\/tribe-nines-creators-didnt-want-the-game-to-go-down-in-history-as-that-project-that-flopped-in-three-months-which-is-why-theyre-working-for-free-to-comple\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tribe Nine\u2019s creators didn\u2019t want the game to go down in history as \u201cthat project that flopped in three months,\u201d which is why they\u2019re working for free to complete the story\u00a0 - 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Currently devoted to growing Automaton West to the size of its Japanese sister-site, while making sure to keep news concise and developer stories deep and stimulating.","url":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/author\/amber-vjestica\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51458"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55279,"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51458\/revisions\/55279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automaton-media.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}