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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.

First released in March for Switch, tactical JRPG and Final Fantasy Tactics spiritual successor Triangle Strategy was announced on Tuesday for a Steam release next month. It's currently 10% off for preorders on the Steam store, with three versions available for purchase - standard, digital deluxe, and digital deluxe plus a copy of Various Daylife. The digital deluxe version includes a short digital version of the official art book, the hardcopy of which I recently acquired myself but haven't had time to open and share at all yet.

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing any demo version listed on Steam just yet. I have to admit that until I was able to play the first three chapters in the Switch demo, I hadn't been fully sold on the game, so I wish that it would be available to PC players as well to try out. As it stands, though, I personally think this is the best game Square Enix have released in years, and I'm personally on my fifth playthrough of it currently. So all in all, I'm thrilled that it's likely to find a larger audience with this upcoming PC release.

Source: Triangle Strategy on Steam

Octopath Traveler II was just announced for Nintendo Switch at today's Nintendo Direct stream, with a release date of February 24, 2023. The game takes place in a realm called "Celestia" (pronounced more like "Sillestia?"), with the setting appearing to be more of an industrial revolution or steampunk versus the medieval-era Orsterra. It's not yet clear if the two games appear in different regions of the same world, but the more "modern" setting looks pretty fantastic in the HD2D engine. Obviously, the characters will be all-new as well, with a new set of eight intertwining stories that change based upon playing during day or night in the world. The new characters include a warrior, a dancer, a merchant, a scholar, a thief, a cleric, a hunter, and an apothecary.

Theatrhythm is now coming to Switch as well, with a boatload of new content. Called "Final Bar Line," the new game will come with 385 songs by default, categorized by game so that players can roll through an entire game more or less in storyline sequence. It will feature two-player local co-op, and up to four players online. It's not clear if the online play will be co-op or team-based, or fully competitive - the trailer in Direct called the online play "Battle."

The DLC for the new game will include songs from other Squenix games, with SaGa, Nier, Octopath, and Live A Live announced already. The stream explained that the DLC will offer up to 90 more songs. Additionally, preorders for the Season Pass will include a further 27 songs, though the details on what songs would be included in that set were thin; I think I caught that "Melodies of Life" would be one of them, but all that information came pretty thick and fast.

Among other new-ish games from Square Enix was an RPG called "Various Daylife" that is releasing later today. It was released for Apple Arcade a few years ago, but I honestly recall nothing about it. It looks pretty much like a mobile-first JRPG, and from what I'm reading quickly online about the original release, it plays like one too.

There were a few other bits of Squenix content in the Direct today, but honestly, nothing really unexpected or groundbreaking. You can see the whole Direct here now: