Ahhh, good old April 1st—the perfect day for anybody to make an announcement.
Indeed, eleven years ago on this very day, MAGES. announced that the fifth SciADV entry would be “Fantastical Science ADV Specium;Boys.” And at the time, they had confirmed a release for Spring of 2015.
科学アドベンチャーシリーズ第5弾『SPECIUM;BOYS』の公式サイトはこちらです！http://t.co/z7h6KlLn47
— スペシウム少年 (@speciumboys) March 31, 2014
In their announcement, MAGES. unveiled a simple key visual as well as the story’s general synopsis: it was set to start off in the year 2038, wherein a town of 200,000 people had completely disappeared off the face of the planet without a single trace. The story would then go back to the year 2036, following first-year high schooler protagonist Hikaru Sendou, who leads his school’s UFO Research Club.
The story in general was set to revolve around the concepts of UFOs, aliens, and even SERN and time travel from the looks of things. Funnily enough, you even see Suzuha in the bottom-right corner of the key visual’s background. Pretty interesting, right? That all makes it sound like a bit of a mix of elements from Steins;Gate and what we’d eventually see from Occultic;Nine and Anonymous;Code.
Beyond the game’s synopsis, the website also unveiled a tagline: “I saw it. A new world that exceeds imagination.” And the game’s logo, of course, had a signature borderline nonsensical SciADV subtitle reading, “UFO. Alien. Kidnapping. Sightings Record. Memory lost. Mothers of the disappeared. The town disappeared. A giant ring. Strange things happens to me the culprit who? This is April Fool’s day But, I believe, disbelieve is up to you…..”
As the tagline makes clear enough, this was nothing more than a silly little April Fool’s joke. In fact, in Japanese, the word for “fantastical” in “Fantastical Science ADV” is “kuusou,” which is very similar to the word “kuso,” or “shitty.” So the whole thing was just a pun for “Shitty Science ADV.”
円谷プロダクション×志倉千代丸(本当の)新プロジェクト「SPECIUM;BOYS」あらため「スペシウム少年」公式サイトを公開しました！http://t.co/jDjJkvVRds #スペ男
— スペシウム少年 (@speciumboys) May 1, 2014
But a month after April Fools, MAGES. announced that this project was actually not a joke at all, but rather something entirely real. At this point in time, they announced the project’s real name as “Spacium Shonen,” with it seemingly not being a SciADV project but rather a genuine standalone collaboration project between MAGES. and Tsuburaya Productions, the studio best known for creating Ultraman. This time, they also changed up the tagline to instead say, “I saw it. An adult world that exceeds imagination.” The general idea of it was seemingly something that would push the boundaries of what you could show on a television series.
But alas, for years, MAGES. and Tsuburaya Productions provided little to no word on the status of the project. The most we’d heard about it was back in 2018, when then–MAGES. CEO Shikura leaked his own project schedule on stream. There, he had Spacium Shonen listed for release as an anime project in the year 2020. This, of course, did not end up happening in the year 2020.
And many of the other items on Shikura’s project schedule were either delayed, like Anonymous;Code, or outright canceled, like Occultic;Nine New World. So considering these circumstances, for years, many were willing to dismiss Spacium Shonen as an abandoned effort that would never come to fruition—that is, until this past November, when Shikura held a TwitCasting livestream and stated that Spacium Shonen was back. In said livestream, Shikura also unveiled some series character designs for the first time ever, which was pretty cool; the most we had seen before then were just silhouettes on the official website. And honestly, I quite like the character designs we’ve seen thus far. They are quite reminiscent of both the likes of Osomatsu-kun and also Gegege no Kitaro.
Will Spacium Shonen actually come out? Given the news from a few months ago, maybe it will. But who knows? With Chiyomaru Shikura’s projects, anything can happen.
Hopefully sometime soon, Spacium Shonen releases for real. But anyhow, happy eleventh anniversary to the announcement of Specium;Boys—the SciADV entry that never happened.
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