Image: Square Enix
Square Enix has revealed its first NFT game, and boy does it look bad.
Square Enix has finally shown off its very first NFT game Symbiogenesis, and it looks like a horror show of big promises and very little substance to back them up. Among these promises are 10,000 collectible NFT characters, allowing exactly three players to determine the game’s entire future and informational warfare. Yes, informational warfare.
Watch the game’s first trailer below:
The game is described by Square Enix in a ‘project evaluation report’ as follows:
Symbiogenesis is a project that brings 'gaming utility' to '10,000 pieces of NFT collectible art.' The genre is 'narrative unlocking NFT entertainment,' in which players solve mysteries and complete Missions and Quests based on the stories that are released daily and the story information possessed by the characters.
It’s not often that a game publisher has to create an elaborate pitch deck to market a game to consumers, but that’s exactly what Square Enix is doing here. The ‘project evaluation report’ explains that each of the game’s 10,000 characters have, “different stories,” that players can only read if they own said NFTs. This creates what Square Enix calls an ‘information gap’ between players who own NFTs and players who don’t.
Square Enix claims that players with ‘more information’ will have an easier time clearing the game and there no limits to the number of NFTs a player can purchase. The report even goes so far as to hopefully suggest that, “one player can buy up all the NFTs and monopolize the stories that only NFT holders can read.” I really doubt anyone is going to go around collecting all 10,000 Symbiogenesis NFTs like worthless Infinity Stones, but I admire their optimism.
The game’s story campaign is planned to roll out over the course of six chapters beginning in May this year and by the end, Square Enix will pick three players to decide what happens next. As in, three players are going to just make stuff up that everyone else will have to play through. That sounds like a totally foolproof system to me! In case you’re still confused how this all works, here’s a very helpful ‘how to play’ chart Square shared via the report:
Other than proving that we are indeed living in the darkest timeline, the chart shows that anyone who completes various steps of buying and selling both quests and NFTs will eventually become eligible to decide the future of the game - as long as they’re one of the three highest-scoring players in the world. What are these missions? We don’t know. How do you buy and sell these NFTs? We don’t know. What is the story campaign even about? We don’t know.
And if you’re curious what these 10,000 collectible characters look like, spoiler alert: not great!
Some of these characters have hats superimposed on their heads, with their hair still showing from outside the hats - that’s the level of detail Square is going for here. It’s also important to note that despite the 30-second trailer and overwhelmingly obtuse pitch deck, this game has released no gameplay. None. We have no evidence that this is a game at all, and not just a collection of pictures plastered on a digital marketplace.
Anyway, Final Fantasy 16 looks great. At least Square has that going for them.