A lot of people, including myself, have not been very happy with what Square Enix has done to their intellectual property lately. And within these collection of train wrecks, I'd like to specifically look at Final Fantasy XIV, the MMO. The game that was so bad, that Square came out and apologized for just how bad it was, and even went on to not charge players the subscription fee.

Since that time, XIV was given to a man by the name of Naoki Yosida. He was told to "fix it." A task no meer mortal would be able to do. Specially with the bar Square has recently set for its self. But Mr. Yosida has done something that has peaked my interest. And that's impressive as I have no interest in MMOs.

So, FF XIV the original was to be shut down late last year. And if you have ever played an MMO that ISN'T World of Warcraft, you may have had the opportunity to be logged in when a MMO was indefinitely shut down. While it's kind of cool since it's a one-time-only thing, it's nothing more than just playing the normal game... losing connection... and not being able to log back in. Ever.

So what Yosida did instead of just throwing the switch and shutting down the XIV servers... he actually made a huge event out of it. The day that original XIV was to be shut down, a huge meteor floated above the sky in a very Majora's Mask Evil Moon kind of manner. Ever present and bearing down on the actual in-game world. On top of that, there were NPCs and quests tied to the coming apocalypse.

So how did the closing of original XIV end? Like this:

Here's the last 11 minutes of the MMO, Final Fatnasy XIV.


Yoshida put a great deal of effort to tie the closing of XIV to the story that will become XIV: A Realm Reborn. A lot of man hours... a lot of time and effort was put into creating this when he could have had the switch flipped and be done with it then and there. And if he's taking this much care with the botched game, I'm really interested to see the kind of effort going into A Realm Reborn. This is above and beyond anything I've seen from Square in several years and is something that has never been done with a MMO ever. Definitely something I would love to experience first hand if I had played the game.

Wow. It kind of makes me wish I got to play that MMO.