'Final Fantasy' Maker Square Enix Teams With Animoca for Ethereum NFT Game

Square Enix, the video game giant behind the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts franchises, announced Monday that it has signed a collaboration agreement with prominent metaverse investment firm and crypto game publisher Animoca Brands.

The firms will work together to expand the game publisher’s Ethereum NFT game Symbiogenesis to a broader global audience. Specifically, Animoca’s newly established subsidiary, Animoca Brands Japan, will work with Square Enix on combined marketing efforts, including collaborations with some of the 400+ projects in Animoca’s portfolio.

Launched in December, Symbiogenesis is a narrative adventure game built around 10,000 Ethereum NFT characters, as well as many more in-game NFTs minted on Ethereum scaling network Polygon. The PC-based game takes place on a “floating continent” on a future, polluted Earth, where the remaining humans fight to survive as a fantastical dragon attacks.

Symbiogenesis will be featured on Animoca Brands Japan’s upcoming NFT launchpad, which was announced earlier this month and is expected to launch this summer with support for both Ethereum and Polygon.

"We are very excited about this initiative and look forward to working with Animoca Brands Japan to bring the Web3 experience to a wider audience in an even more strategic way," said Symbiogenesis producer Naoyuki Tamate, in a release.

Square Enix has already teamed up with an Animoca company: The publisher announced in 2022 that it will bring its Dungeon Siege franchise to The Sandbox, an Ethereum metaverse game owned by Animoca Brands. But that tie-up goes back even further, as Square Enix led a 2020 investment round in the NFT game project.

In fact, Square Enix has made many moves around NFT and blockchain in recent years. It previously launched Final Fantasy VII NFTs tied to collectible action figures via the Efinity network on Polygon back in 2022, and invested in Zebedee, a Bitcoin-centric gaming and payments platform tied to play-to-earn games.

Just recently, Square Enix announced separate investments in a pair of crypto-native PC gaming launcher apps, HyperPlay and Elixir Games, and has released Symbiogenesis via HyperPlay.

Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Andrew Hayward.