TrueAnime - Anime discussion

On October 4, 2012, an anime adaptation of Junya Inoue’s Btooom! aired in Japan, and finished its 12 episode season on December 20th of that same year. Despite having adapted nearly every chapter of the manga that was released at the time, it was still ongoing. And four new chapters were released shortly after the anime concluded, on January 9, 2013. So, while it may take a little while, fans were hopeful that the series would receive a second season at some point in the future. However, there was one thing that the manga could do that the anime never could: move units. Btooom! didn’t appear to resonate with blu-ray collector’s in Japan at all, selling only 338 copies across all six volumes. Meaning that, in terms of Blu-ray sales, Btooom! was one of the least popular anime released in 2012. And, just like that, a second season was starting to look like a longshot.

If you were only interested in the anime, there wouldn’t be a whole lot to talk about. News about Btooom! completely dried up after it was released on Blu-ray and DVD by Sentai Filmworks in December of 2013. Then, a couple of years later, something interesting was announced. On October 3, 2015, at a Junya Inoue autograph signing, a video game adaptation of Btooom! was announced. It was going to be a multiplayer game for mobile devices, and more details were going to be announced at a later date. That date would end up being May 23, 2016, when Asobimo, a Japanese game developer that focused on multiplayer games, announced that they were developing it. It was tentatively titled “Btooom! Online,” and it was designed to look and feel like the original work. In order to enhance the feeling of realism, the game would be rendered in 3D. This would allow them to add more details to the character’s expressions, as well as create a more realistic looking world. The gameplay would be stealth based, and each player would be able to use a variety of different BIMs (Bombs) in order to take out their opponents. But you didn’t have to kill everyone you came across. You would also be able to work with other players, just like in the manga and anime. But there wasn’t a release date, or a release window, listed.

Things started to pick up in the fall, with the game’s website, btooom-online.jp, coming online on October 21. The next month, on November 21, Asobimo released the game’s first trailer. In December, Asobimo announced that Btooom! would be re-broadcasted on Tokyo MX in January in order to “commemorate” the release of the game. On December 14, they started recruiting testers for the Android version of the game, and the limited test would take place between December 21st and December 27th.

Coming into the new year, it looked like the game had a decent chance of succeeding. It passed 50,000 pre-registrations on February 10, 2017, and that number more than doubled by February 20th. The biggest news drop yet happened one week later, on February 27th, when Asobimo held a press conference for the game. The conference began with a gameplay overview. In the “Official Battle” mode, you would have between six and eight players–depending on the map–competing against one another. The first person to obtain a specified number of “Chips,” or the person with the most “Chips'' when the timer expires, wins the game. You could get chips from killing other players, generating them from “C Data,” or collecting “golden supplies,” meaning that you could win without having to kill other players. The first big announcement was the game’s release date for both Android and iOS devices, which would be the next day, February 28th. The next one was that the characters who appeared in the anime would all be voiced by the same voice actors. The last, and most important one to fans of the anime, was a pledge made by Masato Hayashi, the game’s producer. At the end of the press conference, he pledged to make a second season of the anime if the game ranked in the top five of Japan’s app sales charts. “If we reach the top five in the domestic app sales ranking, we will produce the second season of the anime. … I want to ask for cooperation from the people who produced the first season, but I would like to realize it even if it is provided by ASOBIMO alone."

Since the game was free to play, it would have to rely on in-app purchases to climb the charts. It appeared to be doing well, at least initially, climbing up to the top spot in Japan’s free iOS apps, but that wouldn’t last. By March 25, it wasn’t even in the top 100. The game’s last major update was released on July 26, 2017, less than six months after it was released. And the game’s last maintenance update was on September 14.And that was pretty much the end of it. While the game would limp along for the next couple of years, by 2018, people were having trouble finding matches. It wasn’t a surprise when, on February 1, 2019, Asobimo announced that Btooom! Online would be shut down on March 29. Strangely enough, shortly after this announcement, they started performing maintenance updates on the game for the first time in nearly two years.

A fair number of people were always skeptical of the promises made by Asobimo. With some calling it a “publicity stunt” in order to get people to download, and spend money within, the app. But, regardless of their intentions, it failed. And if fans of the first season of the anime want to know what happens next, they’ll have to read the manga.