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If you missed Star Ocean: Till the End of Time when it was first released on PlayStation 2, you missed one of the better games in the series, in fact the one often cited as best. While the newest edition was not reviewed as kindly, Till the End of Time stands up, and now PlayStation 4 gamers are going to have a chance to try it out.

The new release will be digital download only, and if you're expecting something akin to what Square Enix has done with recent Final Fantasy remakes, you might be a little disappointed. While Final Fantasy X and XII were heavily tuned for their newer releases, the Director's Cut of TtEoT will instead be upscaled through software, and the cutscenes have not been re-rendered into HD. The game clearly does look better in comparisons, but those expecting a sea change or increases in playable content will likely be disappointed.

As of now, there is no release date or purchase price available.

Source: Siliconera

Announced yesterday, Square Enix has created a new games studio in Tokyo called "Studio Istolia." This new studio, interestingly named with an English word and a Greek one, will be run by Hideo Baba, recently known as a producer in the long-running "Tales" series of RPGs. The new studio was announced as a bit of a footnote to the announcement of a new project called "Project Prelude Rune," which will be the first project produced by Baba in the new studio.

Prelude Rune is described as being a new IP for Square Enix, and will be an RPG "unfolding across a vast land teeming with life." This will not be the final title for the game or games produced under this banner. Obviously, as a brand-new studio, not many details about the long-term timeline of the project are available, and many are not likely to be forthcoming soon as the studio has listed staff openings numbering at least fifteen.

A final note, their logo looks like a cross between the Final Fantasy XV Carbuncle and a moogle. So perhaps this new apple is falling not so far from the tree.

Source: Gematsu, Studio Istolia

Just a couple weeks ago, Wired reported a Mozilla announcement that half of all web traffic is served over secure HTTP, for the first time. As a user of the web yourself, you should be excited about this - obviously, sites that want your financial or very personal information have been secured for a very long time, but adding HTTPS to other sites is also a great thing. As Wired explains, a secured site makes it harder for people to intercept the things you're reading or posting out to the internet, and it helps you be sure that no malicious groups are intercepting your traffic and leveraging it for their own means.

Today, CoN has thrown in its lot with this half-and-growing chunk of the web by switching all traffic to secure protocols. All images, scripts and text you see in your browser will now be secured, including all forum traffic, news, and fanart submissions and posts. This improves the quality of the content that we're able to provide to you, and also unlocks the ability for us to extend our reach further into social media in the future.

You should now be seeing the pretty green padlock on all of the pages you visit on CoN, at least in browsers that make it easy for you to see such things (I can personally vouch for Firefox, Chrome, and Chrome for iOS!). It's possible that there are still some pages that might not be fully secure due to me missing an image or two, so please feel free to let me know if you encounter one, or if you have any questions about this update. This is the kind of nerdy stuff I like talking about, so don't be shy!

Part of the Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary in Japan is an "Escape the Room" game with a Final Fantasy XIV theme. I never commented on it in a news post, I don't think, because I didn't expect such a niche part of the experience to ever make it over here... turns out I was wrong, and a game called "Trials of Bahamut" will be made available in at least eight American cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, Houston, Orlando, Chicago, and New York. Specific locations and dates are not yet available, nor any information about other cities possibly being added to the mix.

I'm not sure if this is the same game as set up in Japan and just localized, or if it's a brand new experience, but it's really of no consequence unless you're planning to travel to do both, right? If you're not familiar with the rapidly-growing escape-game genre, it's pretty simple. The game in this case will be set up for six players to solve puzzles against a sixty-minute timer. Players will need to solve all the puzzles to "escape" within that window, or they lose the game; escapees then compete with other teams for the fastest escape time. This particular game is built around Bahamut's escape from a dungeon; teams that complete all the puzzles will defeat the King of Dragons before he is fully revived, and teams that fail will be, presumably, destroyed by the creature.

The game will be put on by Scrap Entertainment, known for standard Escape the Room games in the US as well as a new Legend of Zelda-themed game that has just opened in San Francisco and is planned for expansion.

Source: Polygon, Real Escape Game: Trials of Bahamut

The Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary opening ceremony wrapped up a few hours ago, with a number of games receiving notice. A large number of the reveals are release dates and/or patch content for upcoming games:

• Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, the remake of XII for PlayStation 4, will be out July 11 in the West and July 13 in Japan.
• Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia will be out in Japan on February 1 for iOS and Android. There will be a further livestream about this game later today.
• World of Final Fantasy will get Balthier as free summon DLC at the same time as Patch 1.03, which is not yet confirmed for release.
• A series of Final Fantasy XV DLCs have been scheduled. First, on February 21, the "Booster Pack" will be released, containing a Magitek Exosuit to give you a once-a-day window of invincibility for 30 minutes (and also make you a better fisherman). On March 28, there will be a story where Gladiolus is the playable character, not Noctis. Same for Prompto, though his DLC is sometime in June.

There have also been two new marketing screenshots released as part of the meetings today, and they're pretty cool. One is from Final Fantasy VII Remake, and shows Cloud in Midgar with a giant, looming Seraph Sephiroth in the background; the second is from Kingdom Hearts III, made to emulate the famous Final Fantasy VII artwork where Cloud looks up at the Shin-Ra Building. The VII Remake image would make a fantastic desktop wallpaper, too, click through to see it full-size.

Source: Gematsu

And soon! On February 6, the game released in 2015 in Japan and 2016 elsewhere will be released on Steam. Mobius is a Final Fantasy game that, unlike most mobile titles from Square Enix, was developed for higher-end systems using Unity, which should make it a more interesting visual experience on desktops; this version of the game was released in Japan late last year, so one would assume that it will be a relatively trouble-free version for gamers to play. The game's director, Naoki Hamaguchi, told the English Square Enix blog that the game will support resolutions up to 4K and that many players will be able to expect framerates of 60 to 120 FPS, which would certainly be a departure from some PC games the company has released in the past.

Though the release over here is only a week away, the game does not appear available for pre-order in the Steam store currently, so it's not possible to confirm pricing at this time.

The release is timed for a global event in-game. Starting the next day, February 7, a tie-in to the Final Fantasy VII Remake will begin that will feature Cloud arriving in Mobius' world, Palamecia, to fight alongside the game's protagonist Wol in a yet-unannounced scenario. Hamaguchi explained that the assets used to build Cloud and any other Final Fantasy VII-related assets used in Mobius were drawn straight from the assets built for Final Fantasy VII Remake, so Mobius will be the first opportunity for most players to see any live glimpse of what could be coming in Final Fantasy VII's future.

Source: Siliconera, Square Enix Blog