Final Fantasy VII battle royale “The First Soldier” has been shutdown

The services for Square Enix’s short-lived mobile battle royale set in the world of Final Fantasy VII have officially ended as of January 11, 2023.

The details:

• Square Enix has announced that the online services for Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier have been terminated with immediate effect after the original announcement of the closure back in October 2022.
• The game was announced to be in development alongside a second mobile game, Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis, in February 2021. Releasing in November 2021, the game lasted just over a year due to Square Enix feeling as if they hadn’t been able to "deliver the experience they were hoping to.”
• A significant portion of the series’ fans appear to have either lost interest in or skipped over the multiplayer entry due to varying factors. Under the original closure announcement, many pointed to the game being a mobile-only title as a large cause of its failure. Others claimed that the game was full of bots from launch day, perhaps pointing to the game having a low player population throughout its short lifespan.
• The First Soldier was developed to be a free-to-play battle royale game, borrowing many elements from the existing Final Fantasy VII universe, such as materia, magic, chocobos, and moogles. The game also allowed players to customize their character’s appearance and class (also referred to as a job, similar to other Final Fantasy games). The very little story content the game had also tied into the larger compilation of the Final Fantasy VII series, with the game being set 18 years before the original FF7 at the time of SOLDIER's establishment.

What else is going on with Final Fantasy?

• Remasters of the first six mainline games in the Final Fantasy franchise will be arriving soon in Spring 2023. The classic titles will be receiving a fresh coat of paint alongside new music and multiple gameplay improvements. You can find more details regarding the collection in our article about its announcement.
• The latest mainline title, Final Fantasy XVI, is still in development with a targeted release date of June 22, 2023. Returning to the series’ traditional fantasy theme, it will feature action-based combat in a mix of classic and modern Final Fantasy. It will first release as a six-month timed exclusive for PlayStation 5 owners, with PC and Xbox releases likely to follow in 2024.
• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second part of 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake, will hit the PS5 as an exclusive in late 2023 or early 2024. There will be no PS4 release this time around, with executive producer Yoshinori Kitase stating why the developers have opted to skip the now-last generation console in an interview with Japanese website Gamer: "It’s exclusive to PlayStation 5 because of the graphical quality, of course, as well as SSD access speed."

Interested in working on future Square Enix projects, including Final Fantasy? You can check out available vacancies at the developer and publisher here.