I’m not a Final Fantasy player myself (this is by happenstance, not by choice; the games passed me by as a kid and I haven’t had time to go back and explore them yet), but I would like to share an interesting story regarding the franchise; a story that took place in our own world.

In 2010, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV, also known as Final Fantasy Online, the first MMORPG entry in the venerable franchise (UPDATE: I’m wrong; it was the second after Final Fantasy XI). It pretty much crashed and burned, with numerous bugs, a user-unfriendly interface, and other problems that rendered it all-but unplayable. The then president of Square Enix, Yoichi Wada, issued a formal apology to the fans (oh, if only more companies would do the same) and promised to fix the problem. A restructured creative team managed to patch some of the problems over the next two or three years, but in the end they found that the code was unsalvageable and the only solution was a total teardown and rebuild. Current players would receive the new game for free, and their characters and stats would be carried over, but the old game was shutting down for good.

But Square didn’t just quietly shutter the game and pretend nothing had happened. Instead, they took their lemon of a game and squeezed out one of the most spectacular glasses of lemonade in gaming history. They worked the end of the servers and the start of the new game into the game’s story itself; the end of the old game world and the start of the new.

In the months leading up to the closing of the servers, a great red Moon appeared in the skies of the gaming world, while monsters and enemies became steadily more numerous and aggressive. The Moon slowly descended over time, heralding the coming of an unstoppable evil. Then, when the server’s shut down at last, this is what the loyal players were treated to (starts about five minutes in):

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how you keep a fanbase after screwing up.

Incidentally, the new game was released a year later to “overwhelmingly positive” reviews and is still played to this day as one of the most popular MMOs in the world.