After a bit more than 8 years, it happened this last week. The developers officially announced an end of service date for Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (ffbe). FFBE is a mobile JRPG/Gacha game in the tradition and spirit of Final Fantasy.
Growing up, I loved playing the Final Fantasy series and the lure of a new story that incorporated characters from all of the different universes and worlds in the Final Fantasy series was too appealing. It really was great fun, especially early to mid term. Season 1 & 2 were really good especially, incorporating series staples like espers and exploration. Season 3 kind of lost the plot if I’m honest but Season 4 (which won’t be finished in the global version unfortunately) was a bit better.
I loved that even though it was gacha style, the developers were generous with free currency and as a mostly free-to-play player I never felt “lost” (I wasn’t 100 percent free-to-play as I used the occasional iTunes gift card received as presents in it). The past couple of years I’ve been less concerned about playing to rank (there are a number of different ranking events) and have focused mostly on just having fun.
Back to the end of service announcement, the writing has been on the wall for awhile. The global version (which is what is EoS) started skipping character upgrades and some new characters from the Japanese version (which was about 6 months ahead of the global version) awhile ago. Events then started getting skipped (especially character upgrade events). So I don’t think it came as a surprise to many people.
I like though that in the last couple of months of service (servers get turned off Oct 30) a lot of the old events are open and they gave away a brand new version of a fan favorite characters that power creeps everything in thing in the game; this means that in the last couple of months, everyone has a really good shot of beating everything they are wanting to beat.
So - so long FFBE. Thanks for the fun, the excitement, the time spent strategizing how to beat hard boss fights and all of that.