Square Enix Ignores Final Fantasy 7's Themes By Making 25th Anniversary NFTs

Square Enix has announced that it is following through with its promise of more blockchain integration by partnering with Enjin to produce Final Fantasy NFTs.

A press release from Enji announced that to celebrate Final Fantasy 7's 25th anniversary, a digital collection of cards and figures are planned to be released. They'll apparently be tied to a physical version of these collectibles, one of which you can already preorder. The digital card NFTs are expected to launch in 2023.

This first collectible comes in the form of a Cloud Strife Bring Arts figure, specifically the digital plus edition of it. The standard edition is just a figure of Cloud, designed to resemble his design from the original game. "Cloud's signature hairstyle, shoulder armor, and SOLDIER uniform are all faithfully recreated in 3D to instill a sense of nostalgia of his look in the original title," reads the description.

If you specifically get the digital plus edition, you get an exchange ticket that lets you "redeem digital certificate of authenticity and digital version of the figure." It should be noted that the product page has a pretty lengthy caution section, making it very clear that the NFTs will be managed on the blockchain, and even warning that you can lose access to the NFT should Enjin's services ever shut down.

According to Enjin, the company plans to produce carbon-neutral NFTs by 2030, but that is almost a decade away, so the company seemingly is willing to deal with the climate change issues that blockchain technology can cause until then.

Minting NFTs can have significant environmental impacts due to the sheer amount of computing power they take to function. Minting an Ethereum-based NFT will take 142 kWh of energy. For context, in 2019 American households only used 30 kWh of energy on average per day. For some more context, Final Fantasy 7 explicitly deals with the topic of massive corporations exploiting the earth of its resources purely for profit.

Square Enix has been pretty vocal about its desire to embrace blockchain and NFTs for a while now, despite industry wide pushback.