Final Fantasy Grandmasters

» see jp.square-enix.com/FFGM as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Final Fantasy Grandmasters was never sold outside Japan, which for a phone game in 2015 meant a Japanese store account and a Japanese way to pay. Square Enix published it, CROOZ built it, and it went live on 1 October 2015. A million people downloaded it inside a fortnight.

English-language sources file it under the Vana'diel Project, a tie-in timed to Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, the long goodbye Final Fantasy XI was being given around then. The producer said otherwise on the record. Takashi Fuchigami told Famitsu App that the overlap was 本当にたまたま, really just chance, and that he had never worked on the Final Fantasy XI team at all. His department made free-to-play titles. The game borrowed Vana'diel's world and its sprites, but it did not come out of the team that owned them.

A notice on its own site dated 23 February 2019 ended it, with sales of its paid currency already halted, and the servers shut down at noon on 25 April. Final Fantasy XI, the game it was supposedly keeping company, is still running in 2026. It has now outlived its own phone spin-off by more than seven and a half years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ forty seven days of nothing ~

On 1 March 2018, some time around 11:30 in the morning, somebody got into Mynet's servers. Mynet had bought CROOZ's entire game business in 2016: CROOZ spun the games out into a new company called C&M Games on 1 November 2016 and Mynet took all its shares, sixteen titles including this one. A second intrusion came on 3 March, in through a VPN at about three in the afternoon, with the alarm going up at 17:40. By then the attacker had issued a command that wiped the databases.

Thirteen games stopped at around six that evening. Final Fantasy Grandmasters was one of them and did not return until about noon on 20 April, forty-seven days and eighteen hours later. Mynet's own report says the wiped servers were restored from the spare disks of other machines doing the same job, with new hardware built only where there was no counterpart to copy from, and that the security around them was rebuilt afterwards. Several of the thirteen had to be rolled back to old backups. Mynet put the incident's cost at about 3.14 billion yen against final profit, and its shares fell in the afternoon session once the disclosure landed.

~ the download curve ~

The download announcements are all dated, and laid end to end they are the whole business history. One million on 14 October 2015, thirteen days after launch. Three and a half million by 1 June 2016, with a login campaign attached to the milestone.

Then four million, announced on 19 June 2018. That is half a million downloads added in two years and eighteen days, and the first two weeks of that stretch were the ones immediately after the game came back from the outage.

Square Enix never published another figure.

~ the typo nobody fixed ~

The page Square Enix put up to handle the refunds is still live, and it carries a mistake that has been sitting there since 2019. The opening sentence promises to repay holders of an unused prepaid balance in クリスタル, crystals. The formal clause a couple of blocks below correctly names the refundable instrument as ジェム, gems, which is what the game actually sold. Crystal appears on the page once. Gem appears five times.

Four years and almost four months after the shutdown, on 18 August 2023, Square Enix put out the Final Fantasy Grandmasters original soundtrack as a download and a stream. Ten tracks, 1,800 yen, Japan only. The refund page was already wrong by then, and it is still wrong today.

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