Mobius Final Fantasy's failure to launch on launch day
Where time becomes a loop
Square Enix's free-to-play mobile RPG, Mobius Final Fantasy [official site], is now out on PC for regions outside Japan. Or at least it should be out but there appear to be technical problems preventing PC players from actually getting into the game. When I tried to play this morning I didn't have any luck but the server was down for maintenance and the game had a warning that the devs were working to fix an issue with the game only launching in Korean so I waited until the scheduled end of maintenance at 5am PST/1pm in the UK and... still no dice.
Perhaps it's a marketing stunt where the act of going round in circles trying to boot the game up is referencing Möbius strips in some way, and how you can loop round the surface eternally without finding an end.
According to the game's Facebook page:
[About the problem on Steam version]
About the Steam version of MOBIUS FINAL FANTASY released today, some players out of Korea region may download the Korean version. We are currently dealing with this issue. We appreciate for your patience and understanding.
The problem as most people (including me) seem to be experiencing it is that you boot up Mobius after downloading it and get a Square Enix screen and then a warning that you need to update the game. At that point the only option available is to close the application. There are no updates to actually install at this point, nor can you trigger any to download manually.
The devs seem to have been pretty quiet on the matter of what's being done to solve the problem which, combined with an error message which tells you to do something you can't do, is adding to a general sense of frustration. At this point I'm assuming that the error message is maybe the result of a version mismatch which won't be rectified until the update that fixes the region issue is ready (or until everyone starts working on their Korean language skills).
Adding to the confusion is that the game is also part of a collaboration event with Final Fantasy VII Remake tomorrow so I've seen people assuming that the launch date for Mobius was actually 7 Feb which... nope.
I'd been thinking "Well, it's been long enough since I gave up on Final Fantasy as a thing I might enjoy so perhaps I'll give it another go because it's so popular and maybe I've changed now plus it's free-to-play so what do I have to lose?". It turns out I have lost two whole minutes of my life as I checked in and tried verifying the game cache and booting it up again. At least that answered my question, I suppose!