Memories of the Library

SINoALICE is a predatory gacha game. Heavily built around drop-in co-op and guild vs. guild PVP, it is laden with power creep, with many of the strongest units and summons paywalled. If you wanted to be the best, you had to pay up, to the potential tune of thousands of dollars over the course of the game’s lifetime.

However, for those who were a bit more casual—in other words, the vast majority of the playerbase—SINoALICE could be a good, even great time. The story was decent, the characters were varying degrees of fun, the music wonderful, and the in-game community reasonably friendly. I loved it. I did dump somewhere north of $500, including gift card funds, into the Global version of the game these past three years, but it was out of love for the game and its characters. Even though I wish I could have spent more time with them, I don’t regret my purchases.

That’s right, SINoALICE is shutting down. Starting from today, the final chapter is available, and the game’s servers close for good in the wee hours of November 15th. We first heard about the impending closure two months ago, when crystal sales abruptly ended and a final roadmap was posted. We were shocked and saddened, but made peace with Pokelabo’s decision, being well aware of the dire straits the game had been in over the past year. Unfortunately, our story is ending with the fifth act, Act of Elimination; Japan was able to get the three which followed, and many more timed events and collaborations to boot.

The in-game world of the Library is one in which fairy tale characters come to life, battling and eliminate Nightmares and, eventually, each other. There are a ton of stories for all the characters and many Nightmares, and even more weapon tales, those being a tradition in Yoko Taro’s games. That said, here are some of my own stories of playing SINoALICE. Some of these memories are imperfect, but they are all things I hope stay with me as this game fades away into obscurity.

(And while you’re here, click on the image at the top to scroll through a gallery of three years’ worth of SINoALICE Global screenshots! )

Tales of Beginnings
– I was there on day one of Global, and played every day since, up until now, and plan to continue on for a little while yet. The final chapter that was released today will permanently lock the player out of their account, reminiscent of Ending D from NieR RepliCant/Gestalt and Ending E from NieR:Automata.
– SINoALICE was my first gacha game. I remember reading through each new update as they were posted, but eventually just skimmed them instead, as a lot of info would be reused depending on the situation.
– SINoALICE Global started out a full three years behind JP, so a lot of the time that followed was spent playing catch-up, with constant banners and very few rerun events.

Tales of Characters
– The first character I became attached to was Snow White, who is the classic Yoko Taro Angry Lady with Long White Hair. I played through her story bits and don’t think about the other characters much.
– Realizing that Twilight Crystals, the game’s pull currency, can be readily obtained by clearing main story chapters, and, needing more of them, I play more of said main story. My number one favorite becomes Sleeping Beauty, with Gretel in second place, and Snow White in third. Later on, Princess Kaguya becomes my fourth-place favorite.
– During the clam-digging event “An End to Summer Dreams”, Sleeping Beauty/Poacher becomes my first must-have class which I am unable to pull from her Grimoire, or gacha banner. This event also introduces Lammy, a Nightmare in the form of an adorable young clam. Lammy becomes a fan-favorite, in the same vein as Emil or Pascal from the NieR games. I eventually obtain Sleeping Beauty/Poacher from a special Grimoire during a different event.
– My first paid Nightmare was Lammy (1st Anni.), which replaced Mau Archelon during our Colosseum matches for a long time—they have the same ability, but Lammy is much cuter and sillier.
– My second and last paid Nightmare was Pride, the Fullmetal Alchemist villain who was available for sale during its collaboration event.
– My only two paid classes were Gretel/3rd. Anniv. and Gretel/Sorcerer. The latter was, if I remember right, the second ever paid class in the game, and hadn’t been available since then until the Third Anniversary event, which was when I bought them. My Gretel collection was completed for the first time. The only other character I would compile a complete collection for in Global is, of course, Sleeping Beauty.

Tales of Events
– My favorite event of all is “Campout Cuisine”, which featured Alice, Dorothy, and Sleeping Beauty camping and dealing with a mischievous raccoon, amidst much fourth-wall breaking. Eventually, the backgrounds become stock photo clip art, with the characters represented by an ant, a pair of glasses, and a bed, respectively. There’s also an “apple pie” which is actually Japanese curry (it’s a long story). SINoALICE‘s major events were often humorous, and “Campout Cuisine” was the funniest.
– Another memorable event was “An Elegy for Love So Sweet”, the 2022 Valentine’s Day special which featured a visual novel section with Rapunzel and Snow White making sweets together. As one of the in-game spectators noted, “it’s the Promised Land of Yuri in full bloom!”
– “Divine Mechanism of Rebellion” was the rare co-op guild event which featured Nightmares in the starring roles. This particular story was structured like a tokusatsu hero TV show, with giant robots and next episode previews.
– Special features in other events included the photo booth in “Autumnal Ardor”—a guild co-op event which was the very last one rerun after End of Service was announced—and “overworld” maps in the second Christmas event and the That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime collab.
– Other regular event types included armor events, where new sets of armor could be obtained while reading through stories about various Nightmares, and Conquests, co-op focused limited-time events where powerful Nightmares could be taken down. Eventually, a selection of nine early Conquest events were put into a monthly rotation. Due to a somewhat tricky strategy that greatly depended on well-coordinated co-op, “Venomous Fangs” became the most notorious of these monthly reruns.
– For all of these events, my class type of choice eventually became Paladin, though I sometimes played as Breaker, Sorcerer, Cleric, or even Mage, depending on the situation and/or my mood at the time.

Tales of Guilds
– Snow White/Breaker, a sword-wielding class, becomes my first main, used in my profile and during guild battles in the Colosseum, aka “Colo”.
– I only ever joined casual guilds, and, not being a Discord user at the time, tended to avoid guilds which mentioned it.
– The first guild I joined was, if I remember right, called Legion. It didn’t last long, with its members gradually abandoning the game.
– The second guild I joined was SUUUUPER. The only other player who is consistently active is the friendly guildmaster, Poxx. Eventually, they don’t log into the game for a long time, and I started searching for my next guild.
– The third guild I joined was Blade, run by a kid in Massachusetts who went by Arsene, presumably after the Persona 5 Persona. Other regulars in the guild included Oz and Lillianna, the sub-masters who seemed to be a married couple, also in Massachusetts; Shadotora, a fellow Snow White/Breaker user; Aria; and ecilaOnis.
– I stayed in Blade for a few months, longer than any other guild thus far, and even played a little Genshin Impact with Arsene. Eventually, most of the regulars drifted away except for me, Arsene, and ecilaOnis. Then, it was just me and ecilaOnis, who I also played co-op and Conquest events with quite a bit.
– The two of us, hoping to squeeze more wins out of this largely abandoned guild, switch from Vanguard to Rearguard classes, with me eventually settling on the Sorcerer class, which specializes in reducing an opposing team’s power. It proves to be a learning curve.
– A Gran Colosseum—a monthly guild vs. guild event with special rewards—was looming, and no one was around to sign us up for it. I messaged ecilaOnis and we began searching for our next guild. They initially signed us up for {empty}, but upon looking over all the members’ profile, saw one which included Nazi dogwhistles. I reported and blocked that account, then told ecilaOnis that {empty} would be no good, and why. We began our search again and, thanks to ecilaOnis, wound up with Jellicle.

Tales of JellicleCats
– Jellicle, later JellicleCats, was the fourth and final guild I joined. I have been with them from roughly six months after Global launched, through to the very end.
– Aside from the guildmaster Hayley, and ecilaOnis of course, the other members who I’ve known more or less this entire time included microtia and Alicia, a married couple in Illinois; EmmaDee, the resident gay Little Mermaid fan; Schiroh, a German player and fellow Gretel fan, who eventually stopped attending Colo most likely due to the time difference, but showed up again in the last week; Rachel, our bishie-loving paladin from Brazil; Staff-Chan, aka Morgis, the sub-master who rarely showed up to Colo but was a constant presence on the Discord; and SetXun, a quiet but reliable face during Colo.
– Other Jellicles of note during my time with the guild included Emm, an Aussie who eventually gave up SINoALICE when it started becoming an unhealthy addiction for them; Lavenza, who also had an alt under Exsanguis (or maybe Lavenza was the alt?), a more competitive player than any of us, and one who I stayed in touch with via co-op battles after they left the guild; Murasaki, who, like SetXun, was a steady regular until the end; Bolten, a cleric and Dorothy fan; and MustardMan, the best of the last round of new recruits.
– My mains for JellicleCats ranged from Gretel/Half-Nightmare, to Gretel/Gluttonous Tiger Sorcerer, to Sleeping Beauty/Sweet Dreams, to my final one, Little Mermaid/Weeping Onion. All of these are Sorcerer classes, though I typically played with a mix of tomes and staves in the last year or so.
– When sub-classes became available in Global, this opened up several possibilities for new strategies. For JellicleCats, this eventually led to our greatest legacy: sliming. We would create sub-sets with Snow White/Slime, a free class given away during the That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime collab, and bust them out in the vanguard whenever we were losing overwhelmingly or winning overwhelmingly. During some special events, sub-sets featuring the masochistic Princess Kaguya would be brought out when we were facing a battle we would be sure to lose.
– We eventually learned that we weren’t the only “slime guild”, and that there were a few others. I am unsure of who was the first to use this “strategy”, or if these other guilds came up with this approach independently, as we had.
– JellicleCats was one of the factors which drove me to finally join Discord. The guild’s server is small, but still going strong.

Tales of the End
– The userbase dwindled, but apparently, SINoALICE Global was profitable, even though it was clearly running on a shoestring budget by the time the summer of 2023 rolled around. If it had been published in the West by Square Enix like it had in Japan, instead of being self-published by the developer Pokelabo, I very much doubt it would have lasted that long.
– Language support for new content gradually dropped over time, until only Spanish, Korean, and English remained. Then Spanish was gone, and then Korean. With well over a thousand Weapon Stories in the game, as well as Class Stories and, of course, event and main stories, SINoALICE may be the most text-heavy JRPG, of any kind, ever made. Given this daunting localization task, seeing languages being dropped was unfortunate, but understandable.
– Then, on September 1, 2023, only a few months after the Third Anniversary, End of Service was announced and Twilight Crystal sales were halted. We would have two more months of goodies, events, and Colosseum battles, then the final chapter would be released on October 31. Upon playing said final chapter, a player would be locked out of their account, permanently. The game’s servers would shut down for good on November 14th.
– The handful of us devoted SINoALICE players that had lasted this long mourned the impending death of our beloved game. Despite the bugs, lopsided matchmaking, occasional odd translation, and other hiccups, we loved this quirky piece of work, much like we have loved other Yoko Taro games. Maybe even moreso.
– I returned to the morass to post some feedback to the developers, thanking them for these past three years. One of those devs was so moved by my words that he asked for permission to translate and share it with his Japanese Twitter followers. Permission was granted.
– Hayley, being a longtime SINoALICE JP player, invited the rest of us Jellicles who weren’t already over there to join her guild there, Purritos. Many of us do. Having had a three-year advantage, JP turns out to be a much bigger game than Global, but familiar enough that I manage to get around various text-heavy menus with few problems. However, I found myself missing some small features that were exclusive to Global.
– The Last Colosseum Sin ended up being the only Colo Sin that JellicleCats didn’t qualify for, due to the number of available spots being cut roughly in half for our timeslot. I was particularly annoyed about this, in part because this final event featured the special visuals and music from WGC.
– On October 26, a slew of announcements go live in JP. That too is shutting down, in January 2024. The third and final CD soundtrack, and the sixth and final volume of the manga spinoff are also announced. Despair sets in on all of us who had hoped to have a new home after Global.

Thank You
– Once again, thank you, Pokelabo! Thank you Yoko-san, Maeda-san, Kat-san, Kaz-san, Omiya-san, jino-san, Okabe-san, and everyone else who did what they could with what they had to make this game so special.
– I would also like to thank the four guilds I had joined over the course of the game: Legion, SUUUUPER, Blade, and, most of all, Jellicle/JellicleCats.
– On behalf of JellicleCats, thank you to our many good rivals over the years, including TooSpoopyForYouuuu, {empty}, Madness, combo spam masters VanitasVanitatum, Cookie, Lovely, and several others I’m forgetting.
– Thanks a bunch to the many reliable co-op partners who’ve played with me up until now, including Fuchs, Wraith, Endless, Dainsleif, real_eric, Clotho, rymercy, trudeth, and, of course, ecilaOnis and Lavenza/Exsanguis. There are also those who dropped the game awhile back that I would like to shout out: Facmartins, Asia, VinceSocoo, Silversurf, tatsumi5, TheMollusk, Radzio, Aphaia, ghost24, and many more besides.
– If I have neglected to mention you, thank you as well! I will miss you all.
– And thank you for reading all of this! If you happen to have known me in-game, please take a moment to drop me a line and say hi!

The worst of all tales has ended. Time to move on to the next…