Final Fantasy Game Broken Due To Leap Day

Folks trying to play Theatrhythm Final Bar Line-–a Final Fantasy-themed rhythm game—were unable to due to a bug preventing the game from connecting to servers on February 29, aka a Leap Day. A similar bug happened in an EA racing game, too, forcing players to change the date on their consoles to play.

In case you didn’t know: Today—Thursday, February 29—is a Leap Day. An extra day of the year that only happens once (almost) every four years. Normally, Leap Days aren’t that exciting. But sometimes computers and software bug out because of the extra day, especially if the developers or programmers didn’t account for the extra day. It happens every Leap Year, as documented online by folks. This year, for example, some gas pumps in New Zealand stopped working and some apps broke on phones. And for some folks trying to play video games that connect to servers, things stopped working today, too.

As first spotted by Twitter user @Regulus_Tera on February 29, a user on the Theatrhythm subreddit asked others if their save file was corrupted as their game was booting up properly. However, they later edited the post and explained that they fixed the problem by changing the date of their console.

“Edit: A solution has been found, for some reason the game cannot work on February 29th, presumably tied to leap years, and as such it’ll black screen forever until you change the clock back to the 28th, and presumably any date after the 29th too.

Once the date [is] changed the game will go back to running perfectly fine again.”

Other PS4 and Switch players replied with similar confirmation that the bug was real and that this solution worked. Technically, the game wasn’t completely broken as you can play offline, but it was a silly situation caused by the Leap Day and one that Square Enix could have probably avoided.

Guidance for Xbox players:

1⃣ On your console, go to Settings > General > Network Settings > Go Offline

2⃣ Reboot the console.

3⃣ Go to Settings > System > Time

4⃣ Change the date to March 1, 2024

5⃣ Reboot the console.

6⃣ Once this change has been done, the game should…

— EA Help (@EAHelp) February 29, 2024

Elsewhere, EA’s WRC--a rallying racing game developed by Codemasters—is also suffering from a Leap Day bug. Players on both Xbox and PlayStation reported that each time they booted up the game it crashed. This problem is due to the Leap Year and was confirmed by the official EA support account on Twitter, which posted earlier today some steps to get around the bug. Those steps? Change your console clock to skip over the extra day.

While some might laugh and roll their eyes at all this, I do worry that as more games and services are connected to and rely on the internet, these types of “silly” bugs might become more painful and dangerous. I can’t wait for my AC in the future to stop working because Amazon—the only company in the world at that point—forgot to account for February 29.

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