Video Game / Error Game Reset

404 GAME RE:SET (pronounced as Error: Game Reset) is a Shoot 'Em Up Role-Playing Game mobile game published by Sega and released on April 25th, 2023 for iOS and Android devices in Japan. The game features the prominent involvement of Drakengard and Nier creator Yoko Taro as Creative Director and scenario writer. A "preview" app, 404 GAME RE:SET -Prologue-, was released on April 17th, 2023, in which players can preview the main game's settings, characters and gameplay.

It is the year 20XX. SEGA, formerly a simple Japanese video game developer, has rapidly grown into the world's largest corporation and now controls virtually every aspect of human existence. Around the planet, mysterious incidents threaten peace and order and force humanity to abide by SEGA's rule.

You take the role of an average Japanese salaryperson, who has received a prestigious offer to work at SEGA Enterprises. However, while waiting at Shibuya's Scramble Crossing en route to SEGA's headquarters, you are suddenly struck and lethally wounded by a car. What appears to be certain death is interrupted when your consciousness is pulled into a digital realm known as Cyberspace by a virtual mascot named Ribbon. The world around you is soon flipped on its head as you come to learn through the mysterious contact "X" that SEGA has been maliciously tampering with the course of history via Casts, Anthropomorphic Personifications of video game franchises, to make them the most powerful force on Earth. Recruited into the Resistance by X and Ribbon, it is up to you to take up arms in Cyberspace and set right the course of history and dismantle SEGA's rule.

The teaser trailer can be found here.

On October 30th, 2023, the official Twitter account announced that the game will terminate its services on January 5th, 2024, giving it a runtime of almost 9 months.

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Tropes that appear in this game:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: The game takes place in a future overrun by Sega Corporation.
• Amazon Brigade: You and a bunch of video game girls versus a now-MegaCorp Sega.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Figures are a type of item you can collect from the gacha just like Casts. Along with providing bonuses and additional abilities to your girls, collected Figures can be arranged on the shelves in your room as a form of personal collection. You can share your collection with other players across the internet, with free Stamina bonuses twice a day for visiting the collections of other players.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The girls you fight alongside with are personifications of Sega's very own games^note namely old-school arcade games such as Virtua Fighter and Fantasy Zone. Personifications of games from Capcom, Bandai Namco, Taito and SNK will also appear.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Unlike most gacha games, there is a skip feature for damn near everything in the game, which drastically reduces the amount of time spent farming content to power up your team.
  • When performing character upgrades such as Version Upgrade or Skill leveling, you can push a button in the menu that will take you directly to the quest that drops a material you need. You can even start or skip the quest directly from that menu and the game will inform you if you hit the material requirement for the upgrade.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The "Barrier Piercing" Burst Skills ignore enemy shields (represented by a blue shield gauge over the target), allowing them to take care of shielded enemies quicker.
• Artificial Stupidity: Auto movement will generally try to avoid enemy fire with decent results. However, it doesn't move very fast, which runs into issues when being cornered by enemies trying to rush the party for Collision Damage. It is also completely incapable of realizing that lasers and Area of Effect floors exist and will not avoid them until they are already on the screen and hitting the party.
• Apocalypse How: Chapter 3 opens with Cathode Casts from the Bandai Namco Entertainment world and the Taito world invading the SEGA world and effectively leveling Tokyo, forcing the protagonists to jump back into Cyberspace and repel them.
• Car Fu:
  • OutRun (Anode)'s Skill Beta, "Crash", allows her to launch a holographic tumbling Ferrari Testarossa Spider that bowls over any targets in its path.
  • Virtua Racing (Cathode)'s Burst Skill involves launching a Formula One racecar at a foe to deal massive single-target damage.
• Cognizant Limbs: Most boss Cathode Casts will have multiple weak points, each with separate health bars. Breaking them all stuns the boss momentarily and increases the damage they take for the remainder of the fight.
• Collision Damage: A number of enemies will charge at the player's party. If they come into contact, they will explode and all party members will take heavy damage.
• Company Cameo: Taken to its logical conclusion, as the game features an array of Japanese video game companies reinterpreted as villainous Mega Corps.
• Defeat Equals Friendship: By defeating the Cathode Casts in Cyberspace, the heroes can purge the Casts of their corrupted personalities and restore them back to their Anode forms and the real world to normal.
• Downer Beginning: The game begins with the player character outright getting killed by being hit by a car and their memories uploaded to the game world in their smartphone Fortunately, after defeating Cathode!Outrun, the player is restored to reality.
• Easter Egg: Disabling all of your Casts on the home menu summons Ribbon to your room in their place and tapping on Ribbon's robot calls Ribbon to your screen like other Casts. Tapping on her triggers her voice lines like usual, but doing this repeatedly causes the screen to start glitching out. If you keep tapping Ribbon, the glitching will continue to increase until the screen fades out and unlocks the Arcade, where you can play an Endless Running Game called Ribbon Run.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Red beats Green, Green beats Blue, and Blue beats Red. Yellow and Magenta exist outside of the triangle and beat each other.
• Fixed Damage Attack: Inverted with some enemies that have counters over their heads instead of health bars. These enemies will only ever take 1 damage from any hit, and to defeat them the player must deplete their counter to 0. Rapid Fire Burst Skills make it significantly easier to deal with these enemies.
• Flying Seafood Special: At the start of Chapter 5, the player looks outside their apartment window to find gigantic marine life flying over Tokyo... which promptly falls out of the sky, crushing civilians and buildings below them. The player and Ribbon determine that the anomaly is coming from the Taito world and go back to Cyberspace to defeat Darius.
• Hitbox Dissonance: The team leader has a much smaller hitbox than their model, indicated by a glowing white cube at the center. Attacks will phase through them unless they make direct contact with the cube.
• Improbably Female Cast: All the video game Anthropomorphic Personifications are all girls with no males in sight.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: After being hit and lethally wounded by Outrun and having their mind uploaded to Cyberspace by Ribbon to prevent their death, the protagonist finds themselves devoid of their memories and must rely on Ribbon's guidance to defeat Outrun and her cohorts.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: How the Anode and Cathode versions of each Cast works. The Anode forms tend to wear lighter colors and have character designs based on the game's main hero. Meanwhile, Cathode versions of the Casts either sport darker colors or have their designs be based on one of the game's enemy characters.
• Logo Joke: In Prologue, the logo call used for the game is a heavily distorted version of the classic "SE~GA~!" jingle.
• The Multiverse: As revealed by the events of Chapter 3, the world that the protagonist lives in isn't the only world out there that has been dominated by a singular Japanese video game company. By traveling through a wormhole in Cyberspace, he stumbles across a whole multiverse of worlds each controlled by companies, such as the Bandai Namco Entertainment world, the Taito world, and the Capcom world.
• Mythology Gag: So, so much. A lot of the game's appeal revolves around being a celebration of beloved classic arcade and console video game titles from not only SEGA's past but also from other Japanese companies that made names for themselves during the era.
  • The items used for performing Version Upgrades on Casts take the form of classic SEGA home consoles and their component parts, such as the SG-1000 and the SG-1000II.
  • Pretty much all of the skill names are inspired by iconic phrases associated with their source games. For example, Anode OutRun's Burst Skill is named "Magical Sound Shower" after the iconic theme song from the game, and The House of the Dead has skills named "RELOAD!", "Thank You!" and "Weak Point!", which refer to common English phrases that pop up frequently during The House of the Dead's gameplay.
  • Mappy's design is heavily inspired by the titular Mappy, the policeman mouse from original game. Her skill set utilizes tools available to Mappy in the game, such as "Power Door", which plays an animation of a door opening like the many doors Mappy can open and close. Her Burst Skill, Trampoline, shows Mappy bouncing on a bunch of trampolines (complete with original sound effects) and has her shooting a shockwave at enemies like the ones Mappy can use to stun cats when opening glowing doors.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The Cathode Casts that have been corrupted by their respective game companies have monochromatic color palettes and glowing red eyes.
• Retraux: The SEGA logo card in this game uses the original bitcrushed "SE~GA~!" jingle as heard on the Sega Genesis.
• Self-Deprecation: This game might as well be called "Self-Deprecation: The Game", since the publishers are the main antagonists and their own games are fighting against them no less. While this isn't the first time Yoko Taro has made fun of companies he worked with ("Sh*t Square Enix" and demonizing PokeLabo come to mind), it's unknown how much he can get away with in Sega this time.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The idea behind defeating the Casts is that by destroying them in Cyberspace, it will delete their influence on the real world and prevent negative outcomes. In Prologue, Ribbon and the protagonist aim to defeat Outrun to stop her from killing the protagonist. They do manage to kill her, but Ribbon's theory fails and the protagonist winds up dead at Outrun's hands in the real world again.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the teaser trailer, the pedestrian crossing road lights are replaced with Sonic and Dr. Eggman.
  • In the fourth pair of archive videos, And Your Reward is Fruits, the first half has one of the girls using two cookies and her crouching shadow to form one of the ghosts from Pac-Man in the first half. The second half ends with the girls eaten by Pac-Man himself.
• Shown Their Work: The Game History section of the game is dedicated exclusively to real-world information about the games represented as Casts. By leveling up Casts and decoding their hidden passwords, new sections of each entry are gradually unlocked, which includes title cards, descriptive blurbs, screenshots, and miscellaneous material such as their arcade cabinets and posters.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: At the end of Chapter 3, the Cathode Arkanoid and her lackeys from Bandai Namco and Taito flee back to their home worlds after being bested (but not killed) by the protagonist. X and Ribbon urge the protagonist to follow suit and stop them from causing further damage.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The Chapter 3 boss, Arkanoid, is the point where the main story starts breaking out the big guns. She is much more dangerous to fight compared to OutRun and After Burner due to constantly summoning walls of paddles to intercept your bullets, giving her ample time to charge up her Burst Skill to deploy an unavoidable nuke attack that will delete one of your party members if you give her the time to charge it.