Random Roar: Mobius Is Gone… Is Final Fantasy XI Next?

 

In lieu of a presentation at E3 this year, more due to the cancellation of E3 than anything else, Square-Enix plans to make announcements on their own time and when assets are complete to properly promote them.  These announcements are expected within the next couple months.  While most fans are hoping to hear about new titles like the second part of the Final Fantasy VII remake project or a Final Fantasy XVI to show up or even the faint hope that a new Chrono game will finally be announced by the company, my thoughts can’t help but drift into the past and not the future.

After a month of marathoning a doomed game for this blog, my relief at being done with it has given way to fears that I may have to do this all over again and a lot sooner than I’d like.  I’d already been thinking that Final Fantasy XI was getting a little long in the tooth but never really considered the evidence until after Mobius Final Fantasy shut down.

To put this in a bit of perspective, Final Fantasy XI has been running for eighteen years at this point, and during a discussion I had earlier this year, I wondered if the company was going to keep it running long enough for the game to turn twenty before pulling the plug.  Perhaps the company would make an emotional decision to honour a milestone for the game before making the financial decision to end the game’s service, which would give me two years to get to that point in my retrospective and figure out if I want to play the entire game at once or experience each expansion’s story by itself at approximately the point in the series chronology they came out.

By this I mean, the base game was released less than two months after Kingdom Hearts, but the expansions were released much later, so after reaching the end of the first major story of the game, I’d move on to titles like Final Fantasy X-2 before returning to Vana’diel, playing an expansion and then returning to my list of games, and so on.

But my time may be up, depending on whether Square-Enix does intend to put milestones above money or the other way around.  It may mean absolutely nothing, but Final Fantasy XIV has begun to rerun some of their older cross-over events in an effort to keep their players busy during a delay in the making of the upcoming 5.3 content patch.  This patch was originally going to be released in June, but delays due to having to switch to a work-from-home model and to reorganize their offices to promote proper social distancing for the QA team has pushed this patch back into early August.

The first of these cross-over events meant to plug the hole in their content schedule was a rerun of the 2015 event The Maiden’s Rhapsody, which was originally released to honour Final Fantasy XI‘s final content patch, Rhapsodies of Vana’diel.  With the story of Final Fantasy XI having officially come to an end, the game’s days were always understood to be numbered, but no one knew how much more time the game would be allowed before Square-Enix would pull the plug.

Now, chances are this means absolutely nothing, but the next event that was chosen to fill the gap in Final Fantasy XIV‘s schedule is a rerun of the 2014 cross-over event Breaking Brick Mountains, a Dragon Quest-themed event that tied into the company’s third MMO, Dragon Quest X.  This is the third time the event has been held, for it was held twice in 2014.

I’m likely reading too much into this, but the choice of these two events don’t seem to be coincidence.  And yet I’ll readily admit that they’re likely the only events that they could get away with repeating, especially for their Japanese audience who does have access to Dragon Quest X.  The other cross-over events that were held over the years were in promotion of Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XV, and it would not make sense to rerun those.  There was another Final Fantasy XI event that they could’ve rerun, one that ran at about the same time as Breaking Brick Mountains.  That Old Black Magic ran twice in 2014 as well and featured Shantotto being her usual megalomaniacal self during her short stay in Eorzea.  But the developers chose to rerun the Vana’diel finale event instead.

The implications of this, to me, seem clear.  It’s possible that Square-Enix is finally going to shut down Final Fantasy XI and bring Dragon Quest X to the west.  Earlier this year, they finally brought Dragon Quest of the Stars to the rest of the world after sitting on it for five years, and this can’t be the only announcement related to the series that they might feel more comfortable making after the success of Dragon Quest XI.  It has also always felt to me that the company lacked the confidence to run three MMOs in North America like they do in Japan, and perhaps they still do, especially since it’s unlikely that they’re getting high quantities of new subscribers to the world of Vana’diel.  This is especially true when thinking about the relative lack of success for the Dragon Quest series in North America, whose ups and downs meant we didn’t get the fifth and sixth games until much later, the Monsters series is even more incomplete and we’ve so far got completely passed over when it came to the MMO.

However, I will admit that there are obstacles in the way that might make it harder for the company to be willing to commit to releasing Dragon Quest X outside of Japan.  One of the biggest obstacles involves localization and this one might prove to be too high a bar to clear.

While the company has been teasing localization for years, “testing the waters” in a number of ways, they’ve still been developing expansions at roughly the same pace as the Final Fantasy XIV development team.  Since its release in 2012, Dragon Quest X now consists of the base game plus four expansions, and this means that any efforts to localize it for even one language would mean translating five games worth of content.  Even one game in the Dragon Quest series is incredibly text-heavy, which means that trying to get five games ready, plus their regular content patches, is a monumental effort and one which it’s likely the company is reluctant to undertake without a guarantee of success.  It is also just going to get harder for them the longer they wait.

What’s worse is that, as of the English release of Dragon Quest VIII, the series has taken on a much different flavour in the west than before, playing up the various international accents of each game’s different regions.  This is alright when you’re listening to these accents and you only have to process the dialogue through one mental filter.  Reading the text, on the other hand, feels like a bit more of a chore when you’re used to reading proper English in games.  (For the most part, anyway.  The SNES and PS1 eras were notoriously bad for translations.)  I can’t imagine how hard it is for the localization team to not only translate the text of the game, but to also filter it through various accents and even try to make sure the cockney rhyming slang they use is correct.  I’ll admit that it was hard at first to deal with the notion that Dragon Quest IX expected me to Half-Inch things instead of just steal them.  The result is that Dragon Quest is the only series where the player is still required to translate a game that’s already been translated to English.

I do sometimes wonder if they actually have to transliterate accents by hand or if they have some kind of Chrono Cross style filter they can use where they plug in some lines and out pops an accent.

The final obstacle for the localization team is all the puns that the series has increasingly come to be known for.  From the Abbot who works at Alltrades Abbey named Jack in Dragon Quest IX to Pastor Bedthyme in Dragon Quest VI on the DS, the puns in each game have inspired many threads on forums and on Reddit over the years.  Not all of them are classics and it’s easy to see that the localization team has no filter for lazy puns, probably more out of necessity than anything else, but five games worth of puns all at once might prove to be a bit too much for whatever team is saddled with localizing the MMO.  A return to the faux medieval language from the NES days might be worth exploring, which would solve both the issue of puns and of giving everyone an accent as well, but would mean that the team would have to create five games worth of English text that conforms to an archaic form of language and which might put off players for similar reasons as my own for not liking accents.

One possible way they could deal with the sheer amount of work they’d have to do is release the base game by itself and then release the expansions as they finish localizing them.  The worldwide audience would be behind the Japanese audience for a while until we finally catch up, and we might not even catch up until the company finishes supporting the game in Japan, but it would be a way for the game to finally make its way to the rest of the world, especially if our servers are kept separate from the Japanese servers.  Freeing up the Final Fantasy XI data centres would go a long way towards ensuring that can happen.

If all of these obstacles can be overcome, and I’m beginning to think that they could be in the process of overcoming them, then Dragon Quest X will arrive on our shores and Final Fantasy XI may be on its way out.

 

 

Next week: Hang on, how are you able to do another post about Mobius?!