February twenty ninth was the final day of service for Dissidia Remaining Fantasy Opera Omnia, a cell recreation primarily based on Sq. Enix’s Remaining Fantasy combating recreation sequence. Since launching within the US in 2018, the sport has amassed over 170 characters from throughout 30 years of Remaining Fantasy historical past, scattered all through 4 acts composed of a number of chapters and facet tales representing lots of of hours of a recreation that may now not be performed. Although Opera Omnia is formally gone, one particular person has shouldered the duty to make sure the sport hasn’t utterly disappeared.
“On June 6th 2021 I began to work towards my goal of recording and rendering every Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia cutscene and upload[ing] them to YouTube,” wrote Hatok, a video editor and self-described online game fanatic. “And now, 7 hours from the end of service, I’ve reached the end of this massive project.”
Hatok replayed by the whole thing of Opera Omnia, recording the whole lot the sport needed to provide. Greater than merely capturing uncooked footage, Hatok ensured the cutscenes he preserved featured characters with their canon weapons and that battle scenes weren’t populated with random characters — an effort that added a big period of time to the venture as a result of it required watching each cutscene twice.
“With the battle scenes, I also wanted to ensure they matched the story and weren’t just full of [a] random party of characters,” Hatok says in an interview with The Verge. “So I’d watch through them once, make a note of any characters who spoke, and then reference the scene directly before or after to determine which characters should be in the fight and where they should be positioned.”
The end result was two terabytes of knowledge value over 100 hours, collected on and off over three years.
Hatok explains that he arrived late to the Remaining Fantasy sequence and that Opera Omnia was the one cell recreation that basically “stuck” for him. “[The game] had a lot of mechanical depth and fun design, and it was fairly easy to build the characters you wanted,” he says.
That gameplay, mixed with the bold story, are what elevated the sport past the standard cell gacha recreation. Opera Omnia reached throughout Remaining Fantasy historical past, crafting tales that provided larger insights into characters and their motivations like Lightning from Remaining Fantasy XIII.
“Lightning Returns is heavily focused on doing side quests, and they take that and explore what it is about her that drives her to help people,” Hatok says.
He additionally spoke about how the sport linked characters throughout the sequence, like the last word Remaining Fantasy crossover fanfiction, pairing up Quina, the frog-eating chef from FF9, and Noctis, the frog-catching protagonist from FF15. The sport “made incredible use of the characters,” creating interactions inconceivable in canon, like listening to extra from Vaan’s deceased brother in FF12 and Yuna’s deceased father from FF10. It’s that depth that drove Hatok to this venture.
“I started recording the scenes knowing the game would be shut down one day, and there was no way of knowing how [Square Enix] would handle the game afterward.”
“Saving” cell video games on account of go offline by importing cutscenes to YouTube isn’t new, and followers have tackled related initiatives for video games like Dragalia Misplaced. In actual fact, Sq. Enix has finished it for Opera Omnia. However based on Hatok, Sq. Enix’s uploads are incomplete. “[Square Enix] did something I was worried they’d do,” Hatok says. “They didn’t preserve any of the cutscenes that happen in battle.”
He careworn the significance of battle cutscenes, calling them “connective tissue.” With out them, he explains, the discrete story cutscenes can lose cohesion and useful context will get misplaced. In Sq. Enix’s official add, cutscenes will instantly reference occasions that occurred within the absent battle scenes, making a gap within the storytelling whereas characters pop out and in of the narrative with out rationalization.
In a single instance, one among Sephiroth’s facet tales options him teaming up with Ultimecia, the villain from Remaining Fantasy VIII. However with out the battle scene to bridge one cutscene to the subsequent, she simply seems.
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“It’s oversights like that that made me want to try to preserve things on my own,” he says, explaining that he additionally recorded particular voice traces solely out there within the recreation’s co-op mode and characters bios to create essentially the most full image of the sport doable.
Within the bigger dialog surrounding online game preservation, cell titles usually get left behind regardless of being one essentially the most weak varieties of recreation. In contrast to most console and PC video games, which have a tendency to stay out there for buy and play after their life cycles finish, when a writer decides to cease supporting a cell recreation, it’s usually faraway from storefronts, stopping new gamers from discovering it, whereas present gamers await the day the sport vanishes from their gadgets completely.
These shutdowns impression video games of all sizes, even from the most important publishers within the business. Flappy Fowl turned an in a single day cell recreation sensation, racking up $50,000 a day in advert income on the peak of its recognition earlier than its creator, Dong Nguyen, eliminated it from cell storefronts. In 2018, Epic Video games took down the Infinity Blade video games; in 2022, Nintendo shut down Dragalia Misplaced. Extra lately, EA stated that it will sundown a few of its licensed cell video games together with Kim Karashian: Hollywood which had been round for a decade.
With studios unable or unwilling to protect their very own works, the accountability has come all the way down to followers to maintain these initiatives alive in some type. Hatok had by no means finished a preservation venture like this earlier than, however says the prospect of Opera Omina simply disappearing spurred him to motion.
“The fact that the game would one day be unplayable made me sad because then there’d be [no] chance of people giving it a shot and seeing something cool done with their favorite characters.”