Mobius Final Fantasy

» see mobiusfinalfantasy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A phone game dying is not usually worth a headstone. This one gets one because it also shipped on Steam, and that is where the modern shutdown stops being an abstraction. There was an executable sitting in a Windows install directory, patched and owned in every sense a person understands ownership, and on 30 june 2020 it became a program whose only function is to fail to connect.

Square Enix released it in Japan on 4 june 2015 with serious people on it. Yoshinori Kitase produced, Motomu Toriyama directed, which is the Final Fantasy XIII team pointed at a touchscreen. The worldwide version followed on 3 august 2016 and the Windows build reached Steam globally in february 2017. It passed 10 million downloads by january 2017 and 20 million by may 2019.

This was not my category and i am not going to pretend otherwise. i came up when a game was a disc in a box and the only question about the year 2020 was whether the machine would still read it. Gacha economics on a phone belong to a generation younger than mine, and the part of this i actually have an opinion about is the ending rather than the game.

~ the record ~

~ what it was trying to prove ~

That a phone could carry a console-grade Final Fantasy. The art budget was visible, the combat was turn based with a job system deep enough to argue about, and the world of Palamecia had a real script with a protagonist called Wol. Mitsuto Suzuki wrote the score. Two million people played it in the first few weeks in Japan.

The catch is that the business model does not care how good the script is. A gacha game is a subscription with a random number generator in front of it, and the operating cost keeps running whether or not spending does. Five years is a decent life for that shape, and the story getting a proper ending before the servers went off is more courtesy than most of them manage.

~ the steam problem ~

Steam sold nobody a copy, since it was free, but it did put the game on a platform where people expect their library to be permanent. The library entry and the install both survived the shutdown. The thing simply did not start. No offline build was released, no single player mode was left behind, and the campaign that had an actual ending is now unreachable by anyone who did not see it live.

This is the difference between a service closing and a product dying. When a magazine folds you keep the back issues. When a phone RPG folds you keep an icon. Every argument about game preservation lands somewhere in this gap, and a Final Fantasy with a Square Enix logo on it is a fairly loud example of the gap being real.

~ how it ended ~

Square Enix announced the closure in january 2020. The Japanese service ran to 31 march, global sales of the premium currency stopped the same day, and the worldwide version stayed up until the last chapter of the Warrior of Despair story had landed. Service ended on 30 june 2020 at 6pm Pacific, five years and one month after the Japanese launch.

The company said thank you to everyone who had played since 2016 and that was the whole funeral. Twenty million downloads and an ending written on purpose, with no artifact left over that a person can hold or open. It is a cleaner death than an abandoned server, and it leaves less behind than a floppy disk from 1996 does. mobiusfinalfantasy.com answers today with a WordPress site about poker tournaments.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »