Square Enix announced that it will shut down Dragon Quest Rivals Ace on July 5, 2021 at 13:00 JST. This closure will apply to all of the game’s platforms. It is available on the Nintendo Switch, PC, and mobile devices. Players of the free-to-play game are already no longer able to purchase Gems effective immediately on April 2, 2021. [Thanks, 4Gamer.]
The card battle game was originally planned as a minigame for the online game Dragon Quest X, but Square Enix eventually made it into its own game as the development scale increased. It was first released as Dragon Quest Heroes for Android and iOS devices on November 2, 2017. It surpassed 7 million downloads within the first five days and 12 million as of December 2017.
Square Enix brought the free-to-play game to the Nintendo Switch in February 2019. The game is playable on PCs as well. Although it was first made available on Japan’s Yahoo! Games platform in February 2018, Square Enix moved it to Steam in June 2020.
In August 2020, Square Enix released a major update that also rebranded the title into Dragon Quest Rivals Ace. This update added the single-player Solo Battle Adventure mode that lets one fight the CPU instead of another player.
Dragon Quest Rivals Ace is available on Android and iOS devices, the Nintendo Switch, and PCs until July 5, 2021. The PC version is available on Steam, but strictly region-locked to Japan only.
