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Slated for July 3, Square Enix are releasing in Japan a "remastered" version of the Final Fantasy IV Soundtrack. Later in the year, similar albums will be released for Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI. There's not much detail beyond that so far, which naturally leaves some questions. The first question might well be the tracklist - will these albums be a full OST, which would require a few CDs, or is it a single-CD "best of" compilation as some other albums have been in the past? Second, though, and possibly more important, is "what on earth does a remaster of a SNES soundtrack entail?"

Given that these albums are explicitly called remasters, and not anything like the piano collections or orchestral arrangements that have been done in the past, it would seem that these new albums will still be chiptunes as they were originally, but perhaps that the chips used to make the tunes will be of a more modern variety than twenty years ago, creating the opportunity for more realistic synthesized sounds.

If you want to find out, you'll need to import, most likely - Squenix are not currently speaking of any Western release for any of these albums.

Source: Siliconera

Starting today, the North American PSN store has a series of Final Fantasy games half off. Which games, you might ask? Well, a bucket of them. You can get a version of every numbered Final Fantasy game up through IX (not including III, which never has had a Sony release). Most of the games are the PS One versions, including Origins, Anthology, and the three released originally for the first PlayStation. Final Fantasy IV's PSP version is included, as is Tactics: War of the Lions. Rounding out the set are three games from the Dissidia series.

This sale is 50% off the top and will be running for two weeks. The game selection is a little different than the European-region sale that we, uh, forgot to post about until right now. That sale's over, though. Sorry about that.

Source: US PlayStation Blog

Square Enix deployed their now-pretty-typical "hey, we released a new game" video yesterday to announce the worldwide release of Final Fantasy IV for iOS (yours for the low price of $16.99 US!).

The video is pretty standard fare, nothing particularly exciting if you've see the Nintendo DS version before; however, what has people talking is the last few seconds. If you watch to the end, you'll see a bit of crowing about a "Final Fantasy mobile revolution" and the Final Fantasy V logo. This appears to confirm that at least Final Fantasy V is coming to iOS sometime in the future, and the text below saying "and more..." would seem to imply that V is not the end. Final Fantasy VI would be the obvious "more" there, but could there be others?

Not only that, what might we see out of these? Will these be ports of SNES? Game Boy Advance? Could it even be a 3D treatment of each game, which has long been rumored but never executed? And, if it's the 3D option, will we see them also on the Nintendo 3DS or PlayStation Vita? That would certainly be fairly revolutionary; oh, if only we knew. As of right now, we need to consider this tentative news, but it seems pretty clear that iOS users will at least be seeing Final Fantasy V sooner rather than later.

Source: Operation Rainfall

As part of the celebration for the Final Fantasy 25th Anniversary, Square Enix brought in a wide array of artists to create an album celebrating the music of the series up to now. This is not exactly new news, though I believe we missed it in tidbits around the time that it was announced in October. The album was released last week, though, and to promote it a bit more, Square Enix Music posted this medley video to YouTube earlier this week, with samples of a large number of the tracks.

There's a lot of variety on show in this video, and it really makes for some fresh takes on some of the Final Fantasy music that we've heard for many, many years. It's piqued my interest, so I took some time to try to find some English-language shops that sell the double disc; while AmaCoN looked a bit pricey, I found that another of our shop affiliates, Play Asia, has the set for $35.00 including free shipping. If the video makes you want this for Christmas or... New Year's (?), hit that link right away.

Source: Square Enix YouTube, Destructoid

In what is turning out to be a great month for mobile Final Fantasy gamers, Square Enix has announced that the recent FFIV 3D remake, previously available only on the Nintendo DS, will be released for all iOS devices on December 20th with an expected price tag of $17.99. The title has been confirmed for Android devices as well, though the release date is left unspecified as sometime next year.

Apparently, in anticipation of the upcoming release, SE is cutting back the prices of their other mobile offerings a bit, so you may want to check out your app store before then.

Source: engadget.com

Because I've missed a couple Fridays, here's an off-schedule Tidbits post of Square Enix news to cover the gap for a bit.

In case you missed the last post, there are big releases for PSP coming from the Final Fantasy franchise very soon. Over the past couple weeks, the company has had a media blowout to share new shinies with the gaming public from both Final Fantasy IV Collection and Dissidia Duodecim. These probably aren't new to the fans who most eagerly await these two releases, but if you're still on the fence or don't have a PSP... well, you're probably not reading this thread, are you? Okay, in that case, it's just for those of you who might be bored.

Here's a list of the new stuff by game:

• Final Fantasy IV Collection
  • New trailer with "Interlude" content bridging the two games
  • Screenshots from andriasang
• Dissidia Duodecim
  • More screenshots from andriasang
  • Low-quality video of the new Desperado Chaos character

Additionally involving both Dissidia and FFIV Collection is the detail released last week regarding some free DLC for Dissidia. Some of it is free to all from the Playstation Store, two new costumes for Cecil can be gotten for free with purchase of Collection, and the last is just for people who belong to the Mobile Square Enix site, which will bring some free new music into the game. All of these promotions are obviously just for the Japanese Dissidia players; does anyone know from other sources or from the treatment of the first game if similar promotions will run here in the West?

Finally, a bit of bolt-on news, unrelated to the PSP; Square Enix tweeted today that they have another new Facebook game in the works. This one will be set in Japan and will center around some sort of group of fairies. I'm trusting someone else's translation, here, possibly to my chagrin. I think that previous Square Enix Facebook games have been modestly successful, though, so whatever's good for the company, why not go for it?

Source: andriasang