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A new prequel novel set in the Final Fantasy VII universe released in English earlier this week, entitled "Final Fantasy VII Remake: Traces of Two Pasts." The novel, written by Kazushige Nojima (the primary scenario writer behind both the game's original PS1 release as well as 2020's Remake) and translated to English by Stephen Kohler (whose other Square Enix-related translations include Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future and NieR:Automata - YoRHa Boys), explores the childhoods of characters Tifa Lockhart and Aerith Gainsborough, with roughly half of the book devoted to each character's backstory.

If you're a big fan of FF7's leading ladies, the novel answers numerous questions and expands upon the characters' origins, such as Tifa's introduction to Zangan and how Aerith came to be in Elmyra's care. And for the FF7 dorks who always wondered about that heretofore unnamed cat that shows up with Tifa in the Japan-exclusive Before Crisis flip-phone mobile game... Well, I'm happy to report that you're in luck, too! Find out all about Tifa's cat. And its cat antics. And how Tifa is most definitely a cat person.

Published by Square Enix Books, the hardcover version of the novel retails for $24.99 and the ebook edition for $14.99 (available on Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo, and more).

The AmaCoN link is of course right here, and as of the time of this post, it's 10% off. I've already ordered a copy for my daughter's birthday, though there's a good chance I sneak in reading it before that myself.

Source: Square Enix Books/Penguin Random House

An embargo on media previews of Final Fantasy XVI was lifted today, leading to a deluge of new info about the game coming this summer. Gematsu, for their part, released a number of new videos from their time playing the game, over forty minutes' worth split over five distinct videos on YouTube. They are mostly centered around the same portion of the game, it would appear, to avoid being too spoilery, but those who want to know absolutely nothing about the game should probably avoid watching too terribly much. I'm not including videos in this post for that reason, too.

Without going too terribly much into those spoilers myself, I can say that the videos show off a lot of combat in various modes, including solo and party combat in both normal encounters, boss encounters, and an Eikon battle. The boss-level encounters showed off a number of quick-time events within battle, certainly more than I expected. Personally, I felt vibes of both Final Fantasy XIII and XV in the combat sequences.

There are some pieces that show where the devs are working towards that M-rating with the ESRB, as well; I caught a bit more bloody violence than we're used to in a Final Fantasy game during the Eikon battle, and I'm pretty sure I caught an f-bomb in one of the boss battles, though I admit I watched the videos at 1.5x speed due to a general lack of time this morning.

Gematsu also published a transcript of a roundtable with the executive team for Final Fantasy XVI, conducted earlier in February in conjunction with RPG Fan and Den of Geek. The interview touches a lot on bringing the "constant" elements of a Final Fantasy game into this new version that steps further into the action genre than any Final Fantasy before it. The entire interview is quite long and covers a number of other topics, too, including the design of boss and Eikon battles to mash-up genres and some questions about how the game looks pretty grimdark overall so far.

The media tour continues, too - Square Enix announced today that there will be another panel discussion about XVI at PAX East at the end of March (there will be a panel for XIV there, too). Final Fantasy XVI is still scheduled for a June 2023 release.

Source: Gematsu, Square Enix on Facebook

I did a quick search of the site to see if we'd covered this yet, and I haven't seen anyone mention it. It looks like this series started in Europe and Asia and I missed hearing about it then, but now there are 22 dates for this new Piano Concert series already announced for the Western Hemisphere:

• San Francisco, March 3
• Los Angeles, March 4
• Las Vegas, March 5
• Phoenix, March 6
• Dallas, March 8
• Houston, March 9
• Miami, March 11
• Tampa, March 12
• Atlanta, March 13
• Washington, D.C., March 14
• Philadelphia, March 15
• New York, March 17
• Boston, March 18
• Montreal, March 19
• Toronto, March 20
• Detroit, March 21
• Chicago, March 22
• Cincinatti, March 24
• Kansas City, March 25
• Minneapolis, March 26
• Denver, March 27
• Sao Paulo, Brazil, March 30/31

As is my personal luck, no shows within a few hundred miles of me but I will miss one of the shows by only two days with some travel I already had planned.

Tickets for all shows are already on sale; here's a trailer for the concert series that the promoter published recently as well.

Source: Crystalline Resonance Site

Final Fantasy VII turned 26 years old (timed from the original release in Japan) earlier this week, and the official Twitter account had a couple things to say about it. As a bit of trivia, Square Enix announced that January 31 would henceforth be registered as Final Fantasy VII Day in Japan; it's official but not (yet) a national holiday.

What I liked more, though, was the announcement of a special project using LEGO bricks. It's not clear yet if this is an official partnership with LEGO or what it might mean in the future, but on FF7 Day the official Twitter account announced a survey to allow people to vote on what iconic scene from Final Fantasy VII Remake would make the best brick diorama. The four options in the poll are the starry-night Nibelheim flashback, Aerith's House, the Sector 5 Church, and - almost predictably - the Honeybee Inn. The plan is for someone, I assume some sort of LEGO Master Builder, to build the winning scene; after it's complete and promoted worldwide, there will be a raffle to win the apparently-one-of-a-kind design.

That's the only part that makes me sad; at the moment, the company has said nothing about officially running the winning design through LEGO Ideas to put a fancy, expensive set on sale to the general public. The right set would mint money for both companies, so fingers crossed they announce something along those lines later.

Source: Final Fantasy VII Official Twitter

The newest trailer for next summer's flagship Final Fantasy release, titled "Ambition," released just a bit ago from Square Enix. This newest trailer focuses more on the nations of Final Fantasy XVI's world, as well as the characters who are bonded to - and by implication, cursed by - the game's Eikons. The trailer's voiceover goes so far as to describe the events of the game as the "War of the Eikons ," and this seems apt given that most of the combat shown in the four-and-a-half-minute runtime shows battles against and between Eikons themselves. This is the first Final Fantasy trailer I've ever seen to be age-restricted on YouTube, so the embed here will be of the Japanese version as for some reason that isn't locked down the same way.Gematsu's coverage of the trailer includes some additional context from Naoki Yoshida and Hiroshi Takai, as well as the promise from Yoshida that there will be further interviews with the team published in the very near future. Yoshida describes development as being in the "home stretch" in advance of the Summer 2023 release date.

Bright and early this morning in the West, Konami dropped an announcement trailer for a remaster of the first two games in the Suikoden series. Originally released in the mid and late 1990s for the first PlayStation, the new remastered versions were announced with a vague "2023" release date. The two games will drop as a single bundle for PlayStation 4, XBox One, Switch, and Steam, but pricing information has yet to be released. At the very least, it should be considerably less than it would cost you to get an original copy of Suikoden II in this day and age! Check out the lovely visuals below.