News

Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier is shutting down for good early next year

Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier is shutting down for good early next year

In what has come as quite shocking news, Square Enix has decided to pull the plug on its mobile battle royale, Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier. The game was announced back in February 2021 and was the 25-year-old franchise’s entry into the upcoming world of battle royales.

The First Soldier hosted a beta test and soon after opened for pre-registrations, which were extremely well received. The game garnered over 500,000 pre-registrations in just four days, one million in ten, and ended up with more than two million sign-ups by the time the game launched on November 17th, 2021.

And now, in less than a year since its launch, which is quite a short duration, especially for a live-service game, Square Enix has decided to shut it down. They released a Tweet a few hours ago mentioning that The First Soldier will breathe its last on January 11th, 2023 at 7:00 UTC.

They also released an end-of-service notice which outlines the reasons behind tasking such a massive decision in a relatively short time. Square Enix said: “Despite all our efforts to bring you regular updates with fresh and exciting content, we haven't been able to deliver the experience that we were hoping to, and that you all deserve, so we have made the extremely tough decision to end service for FINAL FANTASY VII THE FIRST SOLDIER.”

Players have been privy to quite a lot of events ranging from Christmas celebrations and Valentine’s Day, with numerous updates that brought collaborations with other Final Fantasy games. Until now, the game has released four seasons, with Feast of the Golden Saucer currently live. They even launched a Halloween event that ended today.

But it looks like not even over two million downloads was enough and now there are less than three months before the last match ever gets played. Beginning today itself, Shinra Credits are out of the shop with the only ones left being those in your possession. Support for other languages will end by November 1st, with everything coming to an end next year in January.

Square Enix of course has plans to keep updating the game with events right until the end so at least it's going out with a bang. It’s a good time to hop in if you haven’t played Final Fantasy VII: The First Solider now. Download it now for free.

Also, check out this list of the best battle royales to play on mobile!

Tanish Botadkar
Tanish Botadkar
Tanish is a freelance writer who's an absolute Marvel nerd. If he's not writing, he's probably rewatching anything related to Marvel so that he can spam his friends with theories. And if not that, he can be found gaming on his trusty PS4. While gaming is a passion for him, he also loves science and hopes to become a neuroscientist one day.