GamerEscape

Today, Korean news site MTN is reporting that the mobile version of Final Fantasy XI, which was being developed by Nexon under the name FFXIR, has been cancelled.

Announced in 2015 as part of the “Vana’diel Project” alongside Rhapsodies of Vana’diel and the (since shut down) Final Fantasy Grandmasters mobile game which took place in Vana’diel, this mobile version of Square Enix’s first MMO was being called an MMMRPG (massively multiplayer mobile role playing game).

Since then, fans have been constantly asking about the title, whose development was kept under wraps for the past 5 years. Occasionally, we would have a question thrown into an interview with FFXIV Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida who would say they were still working on it, or we would be checking Nexon’s quarterly reports to make sure it was still an upcoming title being worked on. The only “official” images that were ever released for the game were found on Nexon’s own recruitment website back in 2018.

Most recently, back in May of this year, the internet had discovered images from an online portfolio which showed off environments from the in-development title. Those images were promptly asked to be taken down by Nexon.

According to the MTN article (and thanks to a translation via reddit) it seems that FFXIR had survived it’s first internal review process in Q3 of last year amongst some uncertainty. In addition, the article also mentions that at one point, the gameplay had shifted to combining RPG and TCG elements, but after a year it was decided to end the project.

We have reached out to Square Enix for confirmation on the cancellation of FFXIR and will update this article should we hear anything back.

Update: When asking for confirmation of the cancellation of the mobile version of Final Fantasy XI, Square Enix responded with, the same message we’ve heard before when attempting to get information about the project.

As this is a joint project with Nexon, we are unable to provide an answer to this question at present.

So, is the game indeed cancelled as MTN claims? Could the project be moving from Nexon to Square Enix? Hopefully at some point in the future we can get some clarification about what has become of the project.