For those who haven’t seen the notice, Johren has announced that updates for the global servers will cease immediately and the server will be shut down on August 21st.
Currently, there have been no announcements of server transfers, and likely will not be happening due to licensing issues. The artwork and a large amount of the music were made by 3rd party artists, some of whose contracts do not involve international use. This guide is to help players who want to restart on JP servers.
I highly recommend making a DMM account even if you only plan to play on mobile, as linking to a DMM account is the only way to save your game data. Generating an ID and password will NOT save your data and only serves as a temporary password for device transfers. The wiki already has a nice guide on how to link accounts.
For PC Users:
The browser version currently cannot be accessed without a VPN. This is DMM’s decision, not the TKRB devs’. The VPN is only needed briefly when loading up the game, so even a free VPN will be enough to access the game, as long as the VPN has JP servers available.
You can create a DMM account here. The game’s page is here.
If you are using Chrome or MS Edge, the brower’s built-in webpage translator will come in handy when you are creating an account. If you are using Firefox, there is an official translation addon available here.
For a free VPN, I’ve found Tunnelbear’s browser extension reliable enough to load the game. The free plan offers 2GB of data per month, which is more than enough as long as you switch it off once the game is done loading.
For Android Users:
The JP app isn’t available on Google Play outside of Japan, but you can still install and run the game without needing a VPN. The most reliable method I’ve found is through Qooapp, which is a 3rd party app store where a large number of region-locked games can be found. Updates for the game are available almost immediately and can be set to install automatically so you won’t have to hunt down the new APK every time. I’ve been using this one for years without any issues.
Qooapp also has a built-in screen translator and offers unlimited translations for $4 a month, but can give questionable results sometimes as it is a machine translation.
If you are using a recent Samsung Note, you can hover the stylus over game text to automatically translate. It has issues detecting large text and calligraphic styles, but is otherwise pretty accurate.
For IOS Users:
Unless the phone has been jailbroken, IOS does not allow users to install apps from anywhere besides the Apple Store. However, users can easily create a second Apple account and set the account’s region to Japan to access the JP shop. It is not recommended to change the region of your main Apple account, as this can cause conflicts with other apps and subscriptions you have.
The game can be translated by taking a screenshot and using Markup’s translate feature.
Ingame Purchases
The game’s shop uses a different currency depending on if you are playing on PC or mobile. Any ingame purchases made in one version will transfer over to the other version.
The PC version uses DMM points, which can be purchased here. These points can be used anywhere across DMM’s site but cannot be used in the mobile version of the game. DMM no longer accepts foreign bank cards, but PayPal is still available. Your VPN must be active while buying from the ingame shop, or else you’ll get an error message.
The mobile version uses Koshuu gold. Due to region restrictions, all purchases must be done through a Japanese Google/Apple account. /u/sdarkpaladin/ wrote up a great guide on how to make a JP google account, and while this guide was written with FGO in mind, the steps will be the same. IOS is much simpler, you just need to manually set your Apple account’s region to Japan to access the store, no VPN needed.
Currently there is no way to convert DMM points to Koshuu gold and vice-versa. Keep this in mind if you will be playing on both versions.
