Let's start with the news that is my favorite for the week but has the least overall impact on the gaming world: the original Final Fantasy is now available for the Nintendo Virtual Console. For 500 points, you can play the true original version, with all of its (by today's standards, anyway) slow gameplay and clunky mechanics intact. Will users have any use for this release beyond nostalgia, with revised ports already available for no fewer than three platforms in North America? Probably not, but feel free to prove me wrong here, Wii owners. We... do have Wii owners who read the site, right?
Next up is a followup to last week's tidbits with the subbed Final Fantasy XIII trailer. This week you can get the real deal - an authentic English voice-acted trailer straight from Square Enix. Since the rest of the trailer is the same as you've no doubt seen by now, what do you think of the English dub? As usual for voice acting in Squenix games, it seems to be pretty polarizing—I personally didn't really expect too much, but it does seem like the syncing from voice to character action is a little worse in this video than I would have expected.
Finally, Square Enix released some early monster renders for Final Fantasy XIV this week. This is a nice small news item, and from what I hear several of these renders are pretty much just updates of existing designs from Final Fantasy XI, but they're pretty cool nonetheless. I am a particular fan of the crazy zebra-dragon-velociraptor hybrid and the cactuar's pimp strut. And that marlboro? That thing is legitimately terrifying.
Oh, and just to see if anyone actually reads these posts, I want to point out that you need to start taking quizzes during October if you want to be qualified to win the prize at the New Year. You have to have at least ten quizzes in your name by then to qualify, and if you miss the ones that are open right now, there's no way to catch up!
Source: Nintendo, Kotaku, GameTrailers