‘Final Fantasy’ Maker Square Enix Moves to Arbitrum for Ethereum Game NFTs

Square Enix, the video game giant behind the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts franchises, is adopting another Ethereum scaling network for its Symbiogenesis blockchain game.

The publisher announced early Thursday that its next NFT character mint for the story-driven game will take place on Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum, shifting gears after the first wave of characters was minted on the Ethereum mainnet.

“For Chapter 2, we've adopted Arbitrum, reducing the gas fees to about 1/1000 of the previous cost (around 1.3 yen per bid),” the official Symbiogenesis account tweeted.

While the earlier character NFTs were minted on Ethereum, all other in-game NFT assets were minted on Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain scaling network. It’s unclear whether Square Enix plans to continue using Polygon for future game assets, or if it will fully embrace Arbitrum going forward.

Decrypt’s GG asked a Square Enix representative for clarification on that question and the decision to use Arbitrum, but did not immediately hear back.

Symbiogenesis is a narrative adventure game built around NFTs, including the aforementioned characters, as well as various in-game items. Only owners of character NFTs can access some parts of the experience, however. There will be 10,000 total characters released for the game.

The first 500 characters were released on Ethereum back in December, and Square Enix saw some social media mockery around the curious names—like “Egg,” “Starvation,” and “Wastebasket.” Currently, the Ethereum NFTs start at a price of under 0.12 ETH (about $445) on secondary marketplaces.

A total of 1,500 new NFT characters will be released on Arbitrum beginning on Friday, May 31 via a public auction. The process will last three days, ending on Sunday, with the characters released in small batches over the span. Square Enix has posted a how-to guide about bridging assets to Arbitrum One in preparation for the auction.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.