Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia

~ the eulogy ~

Square Enix put Opera Omnia on Japanese phones on 1 February 2017 and on everyone else's a year later, on 30 January 2018. It was a turn-based party game assembled out of the whole Final Fantasy catalog, with characters from every numbered entry and most of the spinoffs pulled into a plot about a world called Materia and arranged into parties of three. Team Ninja, who had built the PSP Dissidia fighting games, co-developed it.

Gacha was the business model and the roster was the product. Every few weeks a banner went up with a new character and a new weapon, and players who cared about one specific Final Fantasy waited years for their person to turn up. It worked well enough to pass ten million downloads by June 2022 and to run for seven years, which in mobile terms is a long and unspectacular success.

Nothing about a five-dollar ten-pull ever reached me, and I have never pulled on a gacha banner in my life. What this game did have was an unusually patient audience: six-year-old accounts with finished rosters, and a community that treated the free-to-play economy as generous by the standards of the genre.

~ the dossier ~

~ seven years of banners ~

The ending was unusual in that nobody blamed the players. Square Enix's notice said it would be difficult to provide satisfying service in future, which is the standard phrasing, and in this case the standard phrasing meant the revenue curve had done what gacha revenue curves do after year five.

Nothing had gone wrong in public. Nobody sued and nothing leaked. A seven-year-old mobile RPG with a roster of several hundred characters costs more to keep balanced and localized than its remaining spenders bring in.

~ the gem sales stopped first ~

The wind-down was run properly, which is worth saying because it often is not. Microtransactions were switched off on 28 November 2023, three months before the end, so nobody put money into a game that was already scheduled to close. A refund process for unspent currency opened after the servers went down.

~ february twenty-ninth ~

Service ended at 04:00 UTC on 29 February 2024, twenty-eight days after the game's seventh anniversary in Japan. Picking a leap day was almost certainly an accident of scheduling.

The result is a product whose anniversary of death arrives once every four years.

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