Fantasy Earth Zero

» see fezero.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Square Enix closed Fantasy Earth Zero on 28 September 2022 at three in the afternoon, Japan time. It had been running since December 2006 in that form and since February 2006 in an earlier one, which put it just short of sixteen years and made it one of the longest-lived Japanese MMOs nobody outside Japan talks about.

The thing it did well was a fight. Players picked one of several kingdoms and then fought over the map in battles of up to fifty against fifty, with real-time action combat rather than the click-and-wait of the era's other MMOs. You aimed. You blocked. A siege with a hundred people swinging at once in 2007 was a hard engineering problem, and the game's whole reputation rests on having solved it early.

The announcement came in June 2022. Orb sales, the premium currency, stopped on 24 August, and anything left in your account on the last day was simply gone because no refunds were offered. Japanese end-of-service notices almost all run to that template, and after sixteen years this one landed without much drama.

~ the case file ~

~ who built it and left ~

The game started around 2001 under a small studio called Puraguru, directed by George Kamitani. His contribution was the premise: the project had begun as humans fighting vampires, and he pushed it toward the kingdoms-at-war setting it shipped with.

In 2004, with the game still unfinished, Kamitani and Puraguru left over disagreements with Square Enix, and Multiterm picked up development. Kamitani moved the studio to Kansai and renamed it Vanillaware. If that name means anything to you it is because of Dragon's Crown, or 13 Sentinels, hand-painted games with a look nobody else makes. Fantasy Earth was the thing he was doing before any of that, and he was not there when it came out.

~ the paid year before the free one ~

It launched on 23 February 2006 as Fantasy Earth: The Ring of Dominion, sold through PlayOnline, the same subscription service Square Enix ran Final Fantasy XI on. It did not work. By November Square Enix had handed operations to Gamepot, and on 7 December 2006 the game came back as Fantasy Earth Zero with item billing instead of a subscription.

That is the version that lived. Free to enter, paid for in cosmetics and conveniences, it reached a million registered players by July 2011. Gamepot handed everything back to Square Enix in November 2015, and a studio called Ocean Frontier handled development from 2018 to 2020. Four separate companies ran it across its life, and the director who set its premise was gone from all but the first three years.

~ the ten months in america ~

There was an English version, and how briefly it existed is why most people reading this have never heard of any of the above. Gamepot's North American branch put the game out on 18 May 2010 and shut it on 24 March 2011, ten months and change. The Japanese service outlasted its American one by eleven and a half years.

I was twenty-six when that American server opened, and it made no difference to me, because Turkey was never one of the two countries this game was sold in. Ten months is the whole of this game's English-language life, set against fifteen years and nine months of its Japanese one.

~ fifty against fifty ~

What got buried on 28 September 2022 was a specific feeling that very few games have ever sold, which is being one body in a line of fifty that is about to hit another line of fifty. Modern games do this with matchmaking and a scoreboard. Fantasy Earth Zero did it with territory on a map that stayed changed afterward, and that is why its players measured their time with it in decades rather than seasons.

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