The Shrine

I downloaded Mobius Final Fantasy and as far as I can tell this is the first major English available freemium RPG. There's a serious effort to actually have some kind of story and it'd basically be like if you play Final Fantasy 7 and after 3 battles in the Mako Reactor you got to insert a dollar to have enough stamina to continue or come back tomorrow. Now I don't like Mobius Final Fantasy and haven't finished chapter 1, but after thinking about it, the idea of a freemium RPG is not as crazy as it sounds. Mobius Final Fantasy doesn't work because it's trying to put a lot of complicated stuff in a system where you can barely read the description of what the items do and you control is roughly the equivalent of an imprecise one button mouse, but obviously on a more traditional gaming gaming platform you wouldn't have such problems. Now I'm not suggesting an energy-based game on PC or console, as there's no way it'll work, but energy is just a gating mechanism. You have unlimited time to play in grind heavy games like Diablo or most MMORPGs and this doesn't somehow prevent these games from being successful. I'd argue that a lot of RPGs you can almost just beeline from beginning to finish which makes the game feel not like an accomplishment at all. While I don't think you should be forced to go around in a circle to level stuff up, it's also weird to never be remotely challenged as a function of pure numbers.

Obviously such a game would have to be always online just to prevent people from duping infinite premium currency. The difficulty of such a game would likely be very high, perhaps similar to Diablo 3's Inferno mode where you usually walked 3 steps out of town and then died when something hits you. Instead of being energy gated you could have the equivalent of daily quests that gives significantly better chance for loot/xp and then rest of the time you can still try to see if you make more than 3 steps out of the town on content that's presumably tuned at a P2W level (but eventually beatable). You can always spend money to bypass the difficulty. I imagine such a game would have a cost comparable to B2P (~$20) and then you'd probably be expected to spend another $20-$40 for extras or to beat the game without excessive grinding or waiting 2 years. DLCs can be provided as per usual and can probably use the Street Fighter 5/Hearthstone model where it's all in theory earnable in game but unless you got nothing better to do than doing your daily every day for an year you might want to spend money instead on something that's genuinely cool. I think the final product would look something like a Paradox game where you have the base game for relatively cheap and then 3 pages of DLCs that cost $500 if you somehow bought them all. There will probably still be ripoffs but as long as you're not the one getting ripped off it'll be okay.

There are online RPGs that are freemium dating back years now.

With a traditional RPG...
1. In a traditional RPG, stamina is a bad system. Stamina promotes short play sessions, perfect for a casual game's engagement, very bad for one that isn't.
2. For a traditional freemium RPG, you'll probably want to focus on certain consumables (ether potions, Phoenix downs, elixirs, etc...) and specialty equipment that will feel like a good investment. (Genji Glove, Exp Egg, Paladin Shield).
3. Interesting content like new Airships, character outfits, and decorations/characters to put in your hub town if the game has one.
4. An expandable game world, like Final Fantasy 4 the after years, goes against the freemium philosophy of providing the game for free. It limits the player experience, thus limiting their engagement. This is the shareware model; where users get a free version, but then they have to pay in order to access other areas of the game, such as expansions.
5. Games like Dragon Quest 9 which have a post-game that has 5X as much to do than the main game, might be a good way to put to put together a freemium RPG. Then have new free story sections that are scriptable by the dev team, and release the new storylines and dungeons on a regular schedule.

I like the idea, but I think a casual game with RPG mechanics might work better. Largely because players don't play traditional RPGs in the same way that they play casual games. Traditional RPGs are a binge style of games, players may play them a lot for a few days to a few months, but.then they put them down for months, years, or forever. Casual games have players logging in for as little as a minute a day, and they will potentially engage for years. Good casual games have communities of players who will be on IRC or an IRC-like program for hours a day discussing the game, strategizing, etc... This happens a lot with war games, Utopia is a good early example that many here would be familiar with.

I'm sure there are games like that but I don't think they actually thought about a viable model. There are a lot of freemium games that just looks people slap an energy system and a cash shop on something and hope people spend money on it, and I'd say that in general mobile gaming has been primitive enough that you can sometimes get away with that.

I don't see how a freemium RPG can be casual. Let's say you start with Final Fantasy 7, how is it going to work if you run out of energy after 3 battles that you just hit attack the whole time? From what I can tell a lot of people are dedicated to paying nothing forever so if all you're gating is on time there are guys who will just wait out an year or whatever just to play it for free, and on the other hand if all you need is time that's not going to get you very much from the whale anyway unless energy is prohibitively expensive (which would probably turn off everyone in between a F2P and a whale). Even if challenge is artificial, it's better than just arbitrarily being told that you're limited to 3 trivial battles that you just faceroll per day. You got to have some P2W difficulty elements just to make sure there's a reason to continue spending and that's inherently not very casual.