Bandai Namco has announced that SoulCalibur: Lost Swords, the free-to-play entry in the long-running fighting series, is shutting down.

Announced via the Japanese site soularchive.jp, the shut down will be done in three waves. On September 30th, AP Potion and Continue Tickets will stop being sold. On October 27th, all in-game items will cease being sold. Finally, on November 30th, at 3 a.m. ET, the service in its entirety will be closed.

All in-game items can be used until November 30th, after which they will become unusable. Some previous exclusive items will also be made available again. A final commemorative event, titled Ranking Quests, will be held between September 16th and 30th.

The game was first released on April 22nd, 2014 on the PlayStation 3 for free. Despite its dependency on servers, the game features no multiplayer mode and is based solely on matches against computer-controlled opponents. The game has been downloaded over 2 million times. A farewell trailer was released, which can be seen below.

My Opinion:

I gave SoulCalibur: Lost Swords a shot when it first came out and quite frankly, I’m not surprised it’s shutting down only a little more than a year after it was released. The game is a model example of why many people dislike Free-To-Play games. It’s microtransaction model is completely pay-to-win and the game restricts you from doing so much unless you pay. What’s more is the game doesn’t allow you to play the characters you know from the series right away and constantly bombards you with ads to convince you to pay money to have a better experience. I’m a big fan of the SoulCalibur series but this was a mistake for the franchise. Good bye and good riddance.

Esteban Cuevas is an Associate Editor for Middle of Nowhere Gaming and really hopes the SoulCalibur series comes back with a good game. SoulCalibur V wasn’t good either. If you want, you can argue otherwise with him on Twitter. You can also check out his YouTube channel, Twitch page, or WordPress blog.