Theatrhythm Final Fantasy All-Star Carnival

~ the obituary ~

This one never left Japan, and not for a licensing reason. An arcade game built on a national network needs both the arcades and the network, and Turkey had neither. The rooms I sat in between 2002 and 2005 were internet cafes, rows of PCs running counter-strike with a download going in the background, and not one of them was wired to a publisher's scoreboard.

Square Enix announced it formally at the Japan Amusement Expo in February 2016. It was the first arcade machine in the Theatrhythm Final Fantasy series, and the first arcade game of any kind from indieszero, who had made all the others. It was also the second Final Fantasy arcade title after the Dissidia cabinet, and the second music game on Taito's NESiCA network after Groove Coaster. Instead of the touchscreen the console and phone versions used, this one got a purpose-built control panel, and it added an asynchronous online co-op mode where you played alongside someone who was not there at the time.

It went online on 27 September 2016. On 24 December 2020 Square Enix posted a notice that the network service would end, and at 6:00 on 1 April 2021 it did.

~ the case file ~

~ the cabinet ~

The hardware has a detail worth keeping. The game could be installed by converting a Puzzle & Dragons Battle Tournament cabinet, and some venues ran it that way, swapping one machine's insides for another's rather than buying a new unit. An arcade floor in Japan at that point was a set of shells that publishers rotated software through. The thing with the Final Fantasy logo on the marquee might have been something else six months earlier.

~ the morning of 1 april ~

This was not the only machine to lose its network that morning. Dissidia Final Fantasy went off at 6:00 as well, and Gunslinger Stratos 3 went the same day, so one publisher cleared three arcade titles off its maintenance schedule in a single early-morning window. All of it was announced on 24 December, which is the Japanese arcade business filing the news under Christmas Eve.

~ what offline means here ~

After the shutdown the cabinets kept working as standalone machines, and everything that had been gated behind online events was opened up: all songs, all difficulties. There is a catch recorded alongside it. How much is actually unlocked depends on how far that individual machine got through its updates before the connection went, so the surviving units are not identical to each other. A rhythm game that spent four and a half years rationing its own content finished by giving the rest of it away to whoever still owned the box.

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