u/BomberBlur070

I must maintain the agenda

From this Sega-16 interview

>I’ve heard that they’re remaking Sonic CD, which would be wonderful. That was my favorite Sonic game.

Raynegard (レインガルド) was an MMORPG created by Capcom and the publishing house Takarajima. Considered Japan's very first MMORPG predating Final Fantasy XI, it was quite short-lived as its servers were shut down on December 31, 2001, just a little over a year after its launch on December 16, 2000.

While its main gameplay elements were derived from Western MMOs of the time like Ultima Online, it had its players race against time to complete its main objective. Players were given 12 weeks to defeat the final boss, or else the game would be reset, and their progress would be lost. Each week a new area of the map opened, with players being required to clear it before the next one opened. The players obliged and defeated the final boss, but after the 12-week period, the game reset anyway, with only accumulated money and some items being carried over. This was essentially a prototype of the season-based service system many online games use today.

This completely new system perplexed and angered so many people at the time that it is said that the game lost half of its player base after its first cycle. Due to negative word of mouth, the game could only last four cycles and was only released in Japan and Korea. Translations were planned (and English text exists within the game), but due to the game's poor reception, they never came to be.

The game was released physically across both Japan and Korea, but with the game servers being shut down, nobody bothered to archive the game disc, until now. The person who handled the release also published an asset extractor tool to analyse and preserve whatever is left of the game.