Square Enix has as expected announced that the free-to-play World of Final Fantasy follow-up, World of Final Fantasy Meli-Melo will be shut down on December 13, 2018.



Developed by Drecom and ForwardWorks for iOS and Android, the title was launched on December 12, 2017 in Japan. Hiroki Chiba, the director and scenario writer of World of Final Fantasy served once again as director while producer Shinji Hashimoto served as executive producer. Character designs were also handled by Yasuhisa Izumisawa and Tetsuya Nomura.



There was never anything to suggest a release outside of Japan so thankfully we don't have another case of Final Fantasy Agito or Final Fantasy VII G-Bike which were announced for an English release but were shut down in Japan before they were ever launched outside Japan.



It leaves the future of World of Final Fantasy up in the air. Square Enix made World of Final Fantasy with the aim of drawing more young people into the franchise and tried to start a sub-franchise in the process.



The first game sold over 800,000 copies on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita which they were happy with, and following the end of the timed exclusivity period on PlayStation they released it on PC via Steam in November 2017. They've been seemingly doing work on an update to the PC version in recent weeks but still have yet to ever actually update the PC version which is missing Steam Cloud and Simplified Chinese support among other things.



The game also seemed perfect for the Nintendo Switch but to date Square Enix has said nothing in regards to bringing it to that platform or even Xbox One. However the latter is no surprise since Square Enix Japan does not seem to be a big fan of the platform.



World of Final Fantasy also seemed likely to go into the realms of anime and manga as well, with the first game featuring anime style cutscenes in-place of the series' usual FMVs and series director Hiroki Chiba having previously worked on manga novels for Final Fantasy Type-0. But who knows if this speculation will ever amount to anything now.



