Trivia / Arcaea

• Content Leak: Sometimes, data for upcoming events or releases is embedded into the game data and is unlocked when it communicates with the game server on or after the release time. One player discovered, through API manipulation, that they could buy the song "SAIKYO STRONGER" a day early, which got their account permanently banned.
• Fanwork Ban:
  • Seemingly uniquely among rhythm games Arcaea's derivative works policy forbids the practice of using Arcaea songs in custom charts for other games (such as StepMania). This is most likely to be a measure against osu!, which by taking donations is technically for-profit, but does more damage to the regular hobbyist charter than anyone else. The developers of Cytoid, a simulator of Cytus, preemptively delisted Arcaea songs for this reason, to avoid or at least mitigate any possible litigation from lowiro.
  • In a variation of this, CK's official YouTube upload of the full version of "Nirv lucE" (one of the in-game songs) was taken down by lowiro because it had fanart of Kou in the video. While fanart and artists uploading their songs that they made for Arcaea are each not forbidden in and of itself, it seems to imply that CK broke some sort of agreement they had with lowiro in regards to uploading songs made for the game.
  • The developers put out a statement clarifying that they don't mind people making fanmades, so long as they're not for existing Arcaea songs and the software used to run these charts doesn't use copyrighted assets from the game (visual assets, code, etc). However, discussion of fanmade charts is still banned in the official Discord server. It can be argued that this is to avoid putting fanmades directly in the view of the charting team, as if an official chart ends up copying a fanmade, accidentally or on purpose, it could potentially be seen as plagiarism... and it's hard to imagine ANYBODY wanting to litigate THAT nonsense. This is somewhat supported by several charters mentioning, when this statement came out, that they don't look at fanmades.
  • The official Discord server bans the posting of media that contains game assets within the server (but of course outside the server they can't do anything about it). Doing this is often met with a post deletion and an "R4" reply (Rule #4 referring to their leaks/assets ban) from the server mods.
• International Coproduction: Although lowiro is officually headquartered in the U.K., they have staff members from various countries: Director and producer Guy is from the U.K., chart lead Toaster is from the U.S., charter Nitro is from Singapore, artist シエラ is from Japan, and that's just a few examples.
• Lying Creator:
  • The game's description on Google Play and on the Apple App Store states that you can play anywhere and anytime without restriction or an Internet connection. While the game can be indeed played offline, doing so locks the player out of using Partners (and thus Skills), buying or spending Memories, and playing World Mode.
  • When viewing the song packs, World Extend is listed as "free." This is not entirely true since it was free during its original unlock period, but has since cost 700 memories in order to play. Argued here.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": This game often has collaborations with arcade games that, unlike Arcaea, are limited to a handful of countries:
  • The CHUNITHM collaboration marks several firsts for the following:
    • "Ikazuchi", and "World Vanquisher" make their non-Asia Pacific debut. Previously, those two songs could at least be played in countries that carry maimai due to crossing over to that game. "Garakuta Doll Play", the third song of the pack, made its U.S. debut in Groove Coaster 2: Heavenly Festival.
    • The characters Chuni Penguin, Haruna Mishima, Nono Shibusawa, Regulus (MDA-21), Pandora Nemesis (MDA-XXX), Brillante (E/S Primera), Seele Haze, Areus, and Isabelle Yagrush make their debuts outside of Japan.
    • The track "Teriqma" makes its non-Japan debut.
  • The O.N.G.E.K.I. collab marks the international debut of four songs from that game, as well as Mia.
  • The maimai collaboration introduces "April showers" and "AMAZING MIGHTYYYY!!!!" to Western markets. "Oshama Scramble!" had previously made its global debut in Cytus II as part of a separate maimai collab, while "7thSense" technically made its U.S. debut in 2016 when maimai PiNK PLUS was location-tested there. "AMAZING MIGHTYYYY!!!!" was added to PiNK PLUS too late to be part of the U.S. loctest build.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: The Sunset Radiance folder consists of songs that won a song submission contest. Esoteric Order is another such folder, featuring songs that won another contest.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Several members of the development team are already fans/players of Rhythm Games themselves, most notably Groove Coaster and CHUNITHM which the game had crossover events with. Ironically, none of the core team is based in Japan, which is the only country that the latter game can be played in, and CHUNITHM in particular is one of the most demanded Japan-only games by the non-Japan rhythm game community. Even more ironically, the 2020 version of the Arcaea/Chuni crossover adds more of the former's songs to the latter, and several members of the Arcaea team are based in the United States, which came under a near-global travel ban (including from Japan) due to its poor handling of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic, meaning that the American side of the team won't get to play the CHUNITHM charts of their own game's songs for a long time.
  • Two chart artists that debuted in Arcaea's 3.0 update, CERiNG and Exchwasion, were long-time Arcaea fans themselves.
• Referenced by...: SEVEN's CODE has an April Fools' Day chart that, at one point, has floating tap and drag notes much like what this game has.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • On January 30, 2023, Corin Simpson-Bryars, a server engineer at lowiro, resigned from his position and left the company following allegations of sexual abuse towards an unrelated party and the resulting backlash from players as well as the greater Western rhythm game community.
  • YamiNa, who was the lead translator for the Chinese localization of the game, was removed from the team for violating a non-disclosure agreement.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • The song "Singularity" by ETIA. shares the same name with a song by Vocaloid producer keisei. This actually created a problem when the former was crossed over into Groove Coaster, due to the latter song already being in the game; the problem was fixed by renaming the newer song as "Singularity -Binary Enfold-", referring to the Arcaea DLC pack it was introduced in. "Singularity" is also the name of an O.N.G.E.K.I. song by technoplanet, and unlike with the GC collab, no renaming was done when ETIA's song was crossed over to that game. "Singularity" is also the name of a Jun Kuroda song in Orzmic, and just to keep things a little confusing, Kuroda also made songs for Arcaea.
  • Cytus II also has a song called "Alexandrite", although by onoken rather than WAiKURO. Another song of the same name exists in Lanota, composed by brz1128.
  • There are two songs in the game called "Quon": The Feryquitous song that was added as part of the Lanota collaboration, and the DJ Noriken song that was added as part of the WACCA collaboration.
• Trolling Creator: Promotional material for the CHUNITHM collaboration clearly describe Nono's skill, which awards a whopping 2,525 Fragments for getting an EX rank. What said material doesn't tell you is her Frag stat of 0.5, dividing that bonus by 100.
• Troubled Production: There was a fair bit of kerfluffle when it came to the Chinese localization of the game involving the way the story was translated involving outsourcing the translation to a third-party group but without being fully upfront about this, a lot of backlash over the localization that was misdirected at YamiNa, translation lead, who was not being paid fully for their work while being made to meet extremely strict deadlines to revise the translations on their own terms. Eventually, the matter was considered settled by YamiNa received the remaining payment owed.
• Uncredited Role:
  • The game normally has some sort of chart designer credit for each combination of song and difficulty. Sometimes the chart credit is something specific to the song without giving any sort of hint to the charter's identity. However the charts for "Solitary Dream" do not have any sort of credit whatsoever.
  • When the story was first localized into Chinese, Active Gaming Media was initially not credited with the translation. As the initial translation was very poorly-received by the Chinese community and YamiNa remained the sole creditee of the Chinese localization, he ended up receiving much of the backlash.
  • YamiNa, who spearheaded the Chinese localization for the story and revised a lot of the parts that were initially not well-translated by Active Gaming Media, was left out of the version 4.0 ending credits due to the Creative Differences and tensions between him and the rest of lowiro, which lead to him being terminated over violating a non-disclosure agreement.