TouchArcade Rating:

Dark days for JRPG fans: the mega-classic Lunar: Silver Star Story Touch and the not-classic-in-the-least Vay have both vanished from the App Store. They’re currently still available via purchase history for those who already bought them, but if you haven’t purchased them already, you’re not going to be able to. There’s no obvious reason why they were pulled, and unfortunately, publisher SoMoGa seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth.

As those were SoMoGa’s only two games on the App Store, there’s a chance they might not re-up their developer contract with Apple when it expires, which means even those who have bought the games won’t be able to download them anymore. It’s a real loss for the App Store and RPG fans in general, in my opinion. Although Lunar‘s PSP remake is still available digitally through PSN, it seems unlikely the game in either its original SEGA-CD form or the Silver Star Story Complete version will be available again anytime soon, so the iOS version was the closest you could get to playing the original. In the case of Vay, while the game itself might not be terribly highly regarded, the iOS version was the only release that game had seen since its initial launch on the SEGA-CD system, and it too seems unlikely to ever be released again.

Your guess is as good as ours as to why these games were removed, but most of the easy guesses don’t quite add up. Vay and Lunar belong to two completely separate companies and released at totally different times, so it would be awfully weird if the licensing on them expired at the same time. Perhaps iOS 9 breaks the games in some way and SoMoGa didn’t think they could fix them? Well, whatever happened, if you’ve bought the games and want to keep them, you should probably download them and/or back them up somewhere, just in case. We’ll try to get more answers, and if we hear anything, we’ll let you know, friends.