Freshly Launched MMO Chaos Saga Shuts Down After 24 Hours, Likely Due To Massive Copyright Infringement

It's not often a game shuts down less than 24 hours after it launches, but apparently it does happen. Just yesterday, Japanese streaming, video rental service, and game developer specializing in both adult and non-adult browser games -- DMM -- released its most recent MMORPG, Chaos Saga. Less than 24 hours later, the game was shut down.

While some might have been surprised by the sudden closure, it seems that others not only aren't surprised but also think they have a pretty good idea as to why. Take a close look at some of those characters. Do they seem familiar?

If you're like some people, you might think you've seen these guys somewhere before... Say... Final Fantasy XI? Gamers on sites like 2ch, and -- of course -- Twitter have been compiling comparison images and on the whole it looks pretty damning. You can see for yourself in this 2ch image scoped out by Kotaku.

Or this one from Twitter...

@cielvermilion
比較画像更新！ pic.twitter.com/ghZuYJpJqV

— 雪月@低浮上 (@cielvermilion) November 16, 2016

One site even found this little guy... I dunno about you guys, but it seems like a Chocobo to me -- armor and all.

If that evidence isn't enough for you, you might want to take a look back at that guy with the blue apron. See him in both comparison images? Well, our own Mike Byrne pointed out to me that that crest on his apron is pretty blatantly the symbol for the city of Bastok in FFXI.

You gotta figure at least a few people are going to notice that... especially since some people loved the place enough to get a (pretty nifty) tattoo of the symbol.

Of course, the developer isn't saying that the game was shut down due to this particular issue. Instead, they've simply stated that there were a variety of reasons for it to be cancelled. That said, something wacky has happened here, because it's not standard to shut a game down in less than a day for things like server issues or glitches.