WORLD END ECONOMiCA Kickstarter Launched
Japanese kickstarters are somewhat rare. We’ve seen stuff like Kick Heart (which premiered at last year’s Anime Expo) and Little Witch Academia 2 be wildly successful. Smaller things like JH Kagaku’s Akiba Anime Art magazine and Lunatic Joker’s Moero Headphone reader 2013 (English version) have also popped up. This time around we have WORLD END ECONOMiCA, a visual novel trilogy written by Isuna Hasekura and created by the group Spicy Tails. Hasekura is most well known for his stories that both capture the heart with its characters and the mind with interspersed economic elements. WORLD END ECONOMiCA is set in a world where the Earth has colonized the moon and follows a boy named Haru on his journey to go where no man has gone before.
To be honest all you had to say was Isuna Hasekura. I love Spice and Wolf. I also love Magdala de Nemure, his newest work. I also love Kishida Kyoudan and the Akeboshi Rockets who provide the OP song. I’ve been listening to them ever since they were doing songs based on Touhou many years ago.
If you’ve never heard of Kickstarter it’s a crowdfunding website that proves that sometimes all you need is quantity. A single person pledging $20 is not much. A thousand people adds up to quite a bit. In exchange for your pledge there are a variety of awards at different price points. The Kickstarter is for episodes two and three of the series. Some tiers are one or two digital copies of the game. Others include physical items like the game itself, the OST, and shikishi. The very top level, limited to ten backers, include an autograph on the physical copy itself.  I haven’t backed yet but that’s only because I’m not sure which backer level I want to go for. Hell, if they open a higher level I might even go for that.
The first episode of the series is currently available on Steam for the prerelease price of $12.99. It doesn’t come with any rewards but the fact you get to play it as it is developed, bugs and all. The games themselves were finished in 2013 but translation adds its own set of challenges.
The Kickstarter runs through July 9th.
Here are links to both the Steam and Kickstarter pages.