One year Squaresoft (as they were known at the time) decided this needed to change, and announced plans to bring Final Fantasy to TV screens with a new anime. The series would not be an adaptation of any previously existing games, but rather a completely original story. The series was planned to have multiple seasons, be the source of new merchandise, and would ultimately be a new Final Fantasy franchise in its own right. The series was called Final Fantasy Unlimited, so named for the unlimited potential the series had. While things started out good, it wouldn’t stay that way.

When the series premiered on TV Tokyo the premier episode garnered strong ratings and lots of praise. As with most Final Fantasy properties, Final Fantasy Unlimited hinted at an epic story that was about to unfold. Franchise veteran Nobuo Uematsu returned to score the series along with Shirō Hamaguchi and Akifumi Tada to help. Making matters better, the show was licensed by ADV almost immediately, as Final Fantasy had grown in popularity in America over the past several years, and the company felt it would be a good seller in the US market (maybe even with TV airing potential).

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Although everything started out great, a few episodes into the series things took a bad turn very fast. While the series certainly HINTED at an epic story in the first episode, after a few episodes viewers seemed to agree that nothing epic was actually happening! While the video games had some of the greatest characters of all time, many viewers felt the characters in the anime were shallow and uninteresting. Far from telling a mature storyline that the games were known for, Final Fantasy Unlimited was more family friendly (and really seemed more geared towards children for the most part).

Due to the underwhelming nature of the show, ratings dropped fast. Viewers started tuning out in shockingly high numbers, and there was little demand for merchandise. What’s more, over in America Squaresoft released Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which ultimately bombed and lost the game company a LOT of money! While they would have liked to keep making the show, with advertisers fleeing the show and a movie bombing, Squaresoft had to make some tough financial choices.

While Final Fantasy Unlimited was planned to have 52 for the first season, it was cut short at 25 episodes due to the lack of interest from viewers and financial hardships of the company overall. The series would end without any resolution to the stories in the show. While not as big of a bomb as the movie was, it did ultimately lose Squaresoft money, and any hopes of turning it into a new franchise within the Final Fantasy universe were dashed.

While this is normally where the story would end, the sad reality is that the failure of these projects were so huge that Squaresoft was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. While this wasn’t exactly a new situation for the video game company, this time it was looking very real that things could go under. Instead, Sony bailed them out by buying 2% of the company to give them some much-needed cash. The company then decided to have talks with their main competitor Enix, the creators of the Dragon Quest series who were also struggling financially.

The two companies merged into Square-Enix, restructured, and ultimately came out stronger than ever. At some point, the storyline for Final Fantasy Unlimited was completed with light novels, radio dramas, and manga. In a way, it DID become a multi-media franchise down the road! That said, while the story ultimately was concluded, Final Fantasy Unlimited never became the huge hit Square-Enix wanted it to be. Going forward they would dip their toes in anime again with OVA’s based on Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy XV, and the company would even invest in a couple of direct-to-video CGI films (based on the same properties).

However, the sting of the failure of Final Fantasy Unlimited made the company weary of trying to create another weekly anime series, and to date there are no plans to adapt any of their series into anime again. There are rumors that Final Fantasy IX will receive a TV series in partnership with a French company, but fans hoping for more Final Fantasy anime series are just simply out of luck to the failure of Final Fantasy Unlimited.

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