Small and middle-size news items abound for the tidbits this week, around a wide variety of games. It all seems a bit haphazard, but, then, chaos does seem to be the new modus operandi of the sprawling Square Enix Eidos McDonald's Reebok empire these days, at least to us outsiders. Let's kick it off with the upcoming flagship releases.

This week, Famitsu spoke to Nomura and Hajime Tabata about Final Fantasy Type-0, and the biggest takeaway was more confirmation that the release date is slipping. Originally targeted for this summer in Japan, the Squenix bigwigs toed around the issue and implied that the release would be delayed from "short-sleeve" weather to "red leaves" weather. How poetic and not informative, yes? The implied reason is tied to the PSN outage and its impact on development of multiplayer play, which stings a bit since I don't think most western gamers have any interest in the multiplayer. If you do care, though, check out the recap of the interview, which goes into a little bit of detail regarding how the host/client mechanic works. Possibly coming next week in Famitsu, while we're on the topic, is more Final Fantasy Versus XIII information, of which there's been a significant drought for several months. This, too, comes from Nomura, so, one would hope that Famitsu will be playing ball and the update will be interesting and full of things that we didn't yet know.

If you read the forums, you might have already seen the thread about the Final Fantasy-themed rhythm game. Even if you read the forum thread, though, you probably didn't pick up that much. Part of that is that we simply don't know all that much about it, yet; it's got a TBA release date for the Nintendo 3DS, and there are some appearances from characters in Final Fantasy history, like Lightning, Cloud and the Onion Knight , and they're super-chibi-cute. Also, it's called Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy. That's a lot of name. Sadly, we don't know what the music will be yet: classic Final Fantasy tunes? New work? A mix of new, old, and remixes? We'll find out someday.

In Japan, the Mobage network is a free-to-play-plus-microtransaction mobile phone gaming platform. That's a mouthful, but you should get the point. Square Enix released this week a social RPG on the platform called "Gleipnora," which from its screenshots looks to be a text-heavy RPG with some level of static graphics to dress up the package. Depending on the level of the social interactivity required, I wouldn't expect to ever see this in the west.

In the PSN Game Archives series in Japan, the list of releases is ramping up again now that PSN is back even in that territory. Wednesday was the first new-release day since the outage, and as one would expect, a great number of titles were released that were probably ready to go a while back. Several of these are RPGs, such as Breath of Fire IV and Ys IV; one, though, is a polarizing Square Enix title - Chrono Cross. Might that make it as downloadable content for Europe and North America? I'd say it's not at all unlikely!

To finish up today, here's something completely random: eight minutes of stop-motion animation using Final Fantasy VII action figures. It's crazy good, especially when you consider that it's one guy doing it in his house.

Source: andriasang, Kotaku