News

After a painfully long process, CoN is giving to you today, only five years after its release, our coverage for Final Fantasy V Advance (to accompany, of course, improved coverage of the PlayStation release). While it is one of the less-popular games that CoN covers, it remains a quality release even as it approaches its twentieth anniversary, and long ago we realized that our coverage of the game was the weakest of any game covered on the site.

While it did take us far too long to get this content out to you all, we're very proud of the work that we've done, particularly in the massive, Djibriel-penned walkthrough. The walkthrough was fantastic to begin with, with an immense depth, and having it CoN-nified will make it all the better for you too. We've added to that some more of our great CoN features, with all the equipment and monster data you've come to expect, along with our quality miniguides that make the trickiest parts of the game easy to access and easy to understand.

Final Fantasy V is the only game we cover that I have not personally played from start to finish in any of its incarnations. This section is good enough that I now want to. (I probably still won't, but at least I want to!) While I played my usual role of slavedriver, though, this section really came to be based mostly on the hard work of others. They're all listed on the new Final Fantasy V landing page, and will all get their site awards quite soon, but I wanted to take the time to mention a few specifically: Djibriel, for offering us his fine work and being willing to work with us as we adjusted the tone a bit to best represent CoN; Death Penalty, who continued to push me and put way too much work into the section for someone who doesn't even particularly like the game; and EvilEye, who isn't even on the bloody site staff and never has been, but poured dozens of hours into testing simply because he loves CoN.

I hope that you all take a look at this section today and in the days going forward, and that it helps push you toward wanting to play this game, on PSX or GBA (or even SNES), for the first time or for another time. Thanks to you all for visiting CoN and keeping work like this going through your very presence.

Oh, and if the title of this news article confuses you, you need only look several years in the past.

I have felt for a while that not enough people go to the fanart galleries here on CoN to show their appreciation for the artists who have contributed here, some of them for going on a decade. I understand that a lot of folks don't feel comfortable leaving comments on art, especially if the folks in question are not artists themselves - as someone who once was in that position of discomfort, I know that it can be a tough barrier to hurdle.

I want all of us to feel like we have some interaction with the artists here, though, because we want to keep our fanart section going and bringing in as many new artists as we can to supplement those who have submitted dozens of pieces. Even if you can't speak to the composition or lighting or media of fanart, the artists still love it when you're willing to at least subjectively decide how you feel about art, both as a whole and on their individual works.

So, starting today, you can now show a little bit how much you care about CoN's artists by voting on fanart and being rewarded with site awards for doing so! We'll keep track of how many ratings you make, and your account will soon be able to show off just how much time you spend looking through our galleries.

A few things you will want to know: one, we've reset the tracking of ratings on all fanart, so yes, you can re-rate fanarts you've rated once before. Also, we don't track the number that you rated, only that you rated. If you really feel that something deserves a low grade, give it - nobody will ever be able to call you out for it. We want honesty in our comments and ratings, because that's what makes them valuable. Finally, you can only receive credit towards site awards by being logged in when you make your votes (by checking the "remember me" box when you log in). If the site doesn't thank you by name after you rate a fanart, you probably didn't get credit. Edit: If your name doesn't show up but you're definitely logged in, though, you did get credit, don't worry.

So, please, use some of your time over the holidays of the next couple weeks to show your appreciation for our artists. You can bling out your own profile a bit while doing so, and then everything's a bit shinier sitewide.

Well, it's not the PlayStation Network. It's definitely not Steam. However, the Square Enix Members site does share one thing in common with those two: it's an online gaming portal and community site that has had personal data compromised by external intrusion so far this year.

Note: You can ignore the more sensational headline in the link above if you're worried about financial information being compromised, if, say, you play Final Fantasy XI - no credit card information was stored on the hacked server, according to Squenix.

At this time, it's unknown how deep the intrusion went, and how many members might have been impacted, or how much data was accessed from those members. Squenix as yet aren't even confirming that data was definitely taken, but, come on, we kind of know how this goes by now. If there's evidence of an intrusion, it's safest to just assume that everything they had got boosted right out the back door.

Is anyone out there even a member of this site? I have been for a few years, but have found it of precious little use for me personally as yet.

Source: Kotaku

Final Fantasy XIII-2 inches ever closer, so it's no surprise that the week's news is primarily related to the sequel inbound. Kotaku posted not one, but two articles this week with nothing but new screenshots, and it seems that the hottest thing revealed within (no pun intended) is the new merchant, Chocolina, who dresses up like a chocobo on fire - if the chocobo wanted to show some skin. I'm hoping that getup is all faux chocobo, or else PETA will be on Squenix' case now that they're done with Mario.

The sequel also changes up the battle system a bit, as well as the excellent battle music, from its predecessor. It looks like the changes are subtle - to me, the battles in the video seemed a little faster-paced from what I've seen so far in Final Fantasy XIII, and the addition of quick-time events with chained combos from different party members looks good. It appears that you might be able to change the party leader during combat as well, which perhaps will also mean a change in the "hey, your leader's dead, no reason to keep fighting now game over hahahaha" aspect of the first game.

Also, for some reason, there will be DLC to allow Noel to dress up as Assassin's Creed's Ezio. This paragraph is short because, really, what else are you going to say about that?

An interview by Destructoid with Yoshinori Kitase and Motomu Toriyama has been making the rounds since being published last week, and it seems to have caught a lot of people's attention for the fact that it seems to indicate the possibility of a Final Fantasy that is a first-person shooter. Naturally, this has a lot of people up in arms (again, no pun intended), but if the quote is correctly written, the interview really says nothing more than "anything could happen at any time." There could just as easily be a FPS Final Fantasy as there could be a cart racer set with Final Fantasy charact... okay, well, that's a bad example.

Last news of the week, breaking just today, is that there actually will be a new action-RPG IP coming from Square Enix in the near future, once they can finish all the hires they want to build the game out. The first image representing this game was released today, and it means very little. If you presented the image without content, I would have guessed Devil May Cry at first. Not sure what that means, to be honest, but, hey, there's a big white owl.

Source: Kotaku, Destructoid

Yep, hot on the heels of the launch to the PlayStation Network, Chrono Trigger is now coming to iOS "next month." An exact release date is not yet known, since it has to go through the iTunes store; the price is still unconfirmed as well (though other releases have been at around the sixteen-dollar price point). Eurogamer also claims that a port for Android is on the way, as well.

The game's going to be released worldwide, and will be available in seven different languages. It is not yet clear from which version this port will be derived, so the presence of the Toriyama animated cutscenes or Nintendo DS bonus content is, as yet, unconfirmed.

Source: Eurogamer.net, Kotaku

In what must seem like breakneck speed relative to the development of Final Fantasy XIII (or, of course, Versus), Final Fantasy XIII-2 is about to be released; it's almost exactly a month away in Japan, and it's due in the West in about twelve weeks. As it approaches, news of preorder bonuses collector's editions has broken, as seems to be the way with all blockbuster releases these days. In Japan, the Xbox 360 version will come bundled with a calendar showing stills and character renders from the game - just the kind of awesome bonus that is good for forever exactly a year. That's all the news from the land of the Big Red Dot, but, here in the United States the collectors editions are getting to be a bigger deal.

For an MSRP of eighty dollars, American gamers will have a crack at a pretty solid collection of goodies. The box art will have some very classy silver-on-white Amano artwork, and inside the package will rest an artbook and a four-CD soundtrack set. Beyond that, there are pre-order incentives being offered (it's not yet clear, but I assume these will be for both standard and collector's editions) at various retailers. I'll ignore for the moment that I really hate the idea of offering different bonuses for different retailers, and I'll just tell you what you can get: At Best Buy, you'll get a hardcover book that tells the story of the time between Final Fantasy XIII and its sequel; at Gamestop, you'll get a code for a DLC costume for Serah; at Amazon, you'll get a bonus boss battle against Omega - no indication if it's a similar Omega to a past Final Fantasy game, but this Omega can also become a playable character. Odds are that everything but the book will be available for free or as paid DLC eventually, though, so it would seem on the surface that Best Buy is the way to go.

Elsewhere, Final Fantasy Type-0 sold a half-million copies in its first week of Japanese release. That puts it roughly on par with some of Squenix' other big-time PSP releases, such as Crisis Core and the first Dissidia. That half-million number made Type-0 the best selling game on the market last week. And it still doesn't have a Western release date.

For those still excited about Dragon Quest X, the first MMO bearing the Dragon Quest name, we got beta details this week. If you're reading this, well, you're not in the beta. At least not yet. This initial round is only for Japanese players, and you must have a Japanese Square Enix Members account. The application process is kicking off soon and is competitive, not first-come, first-served. Also, since there's no such thing as a WiiU yet, this beta will be taking place solely on the current Wii.

Last, for the business-minded folks, Square Enix revised their projected earnings for the first half of the current fiscal year. The net sales only went up a bit, but the FY operating income and net income saw their projections double. Perhaps all is not yet lost for the company that seems to have lost its shine over the last five years or so?

Source: andriasang, Kotaku, 1up