News

If you've been at the forums recently, you not only know about the Square Enix 1st Production Department Premier, and you've probably also read some bits and pieces about the contents of the mini-exposition, too. For your convenience, though, we'll roll it up a bit for you here in the news section. Where we ask people to post new news and such!

Anyway, here's the big stuff. As just about everyone knows by now, there's going to be a Final Fantasy XIII-2, and it has a trailer already. This game's still not Versus. That's still its own game, and it has a new trailer too. And after all this time, that's still all it has. If that doesn't get you excited for its prospects, well, there's not much more I can do for you.

In other Final Fantasy XIII news, the game that we always knew as Agito is Agito no longer; the newly mentioned Type-0 is the new name. The other Final Fantasy XIII news is that Type-0 won't actually be a Final Fantasy game any more, but instead is the starting point for a new series.

Square Enix also showed Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Final Mix, which is an extended version of the Birth By Sleep game released last year. Previous Final Mix releases in the series have been Japan-only, and have mostly been Japanese releases of the American version, with a bit of bonus content.

The newest Kingdom Hearts will be coming out for Nintendo's new 3DS, and at this meeting, it got a name: Dream Drop Distance. You see what they did there? There are three "D"s in that name. It's on a 3-D system. Et cetera. Sora and Riku both will star.

Duodecim got some significant play as well, with new characters announced, including Gilgamesh. There's going to be a paid demo in Japan, and folks who buy the demo can get Aeris as an assist character in the full game. No word yet on whether that will be a possibility elsewhere, of course. The American release date was announced separately, too - the game will hit stores here on 22 March, for thirty bucks, and it's ready for pre-order on AmaCoN now, as is The 3rd Birthday, which happens to come out a week later.

Yeah, that's a lot of stuff for a meeting that only happened for about three hours. Not knowing Japanese, hey, I might have missed some stuff, too. Feel free to let me know in the comments.


Source: Kotaku, andriasang, Kingdom Hearts Insider

In case you don't already own one of the many, many PSP bundles released in Japan already (and, come on, who doesn't have at least two?), you might be interested to know that there's yet another one coming, this time for everyone's favorite Final Fantasy universe fighting game. Well, the sequel to everyone's favorite, at least. I expect that it will need to be at least released before it's everyone's favorite in general.

Anyway, it looks as if this bundle, in a striking black and white, features artwork by Yoshitaka Amano on the front and the Dissidia 012 [duodecim] logo on the back battery case. Naturally, it's the PSP-3000 model. This is the first bundle to be designed with Amano artwork, and only the second specially-designed bundle for a Final Fantasy game (the first being for Crisis Core) and third for Square-Enix (Star Ocean got one too).

No word yet on whether this one will make it to the West. Keep your fingers crossed, Dissidia fans, or pony up the 23,000 yen!

Source: Kotaku

Just wanted to let you all know that Tiddles and I performed a bit of minor surgery on the forums today. It's really no big deal, it was just something that needed to be done to work out a long-standing kink on the news submission system. In fact, you lot won't even notice it, I don't think - however, part of the fix is that links that you put in your posts will no longer open a new window. Since everyone with half a brain now use a browser that has tabs, this is really no big deal: just middle click links like most people have been doing for years already.

This will impact only posts made from now on. Thanks for understanding the changes we needed to improve the site as a whole!

Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy just keeps trucking along; since the last news about DW, the music production has released a bunch of new dates - however, first to the upcoming dates that were already public:

The next dates in the concert series are 6 and 7 November, 2010, in Tokyo. The shows are sold out, but there's a limited number of held-back seats being sold via lottery. If you want to make a quick trip to Tokyo, anyone worldwide is eligible to put their name in the hat.

After that comes the Toronto show, on 27 November. That's the weekend of American Thanksgiving, so a holiday trip might make this show accessible to Ontario and some Americans too. Uematsu has been confirmed to attend this show, as well, which makes the thought of going all the sweeter.

Then, it's time to start planning 2011. Are you Australian or English? Annoyed that you haven't had a Distant Worlds concert in your country? Worry no more. Sydney's getting two shows, 15 and 16 April of 2011. Tickets go on sale tomorrow, even. After that, London's getting a single show on 5 November 2011; given that it's still thirteen months away, tickets won't be on sale there for quite a while. In between, Chicago's getting another pair of shows, a matinee and evening performance on 26 June 2011. The current plan is for Uematsu to appear at all of these shows, too.

That's all for now in terms of tour dates; however, with the huge gaps in 2011, expect to see more quite soon.

Source: Distant Worlds

With all the news about the 3DS, it's clear that the Square Enix news of the week is going to be handheld-centric. Final Fantasy XIV has been out for Collector's Edition players for over a week now, so it's old news already. What's new is all the gaming on the go - hope you're prepared to take some road trips in the near future to accommodate it all.

Staying first with the week's general trend of the 3DS, it's worth noting that of all the franchises promised for the new Nintendo portable, Squenix isn't giving any release dates at all, yet. The only games officially presented at Nintendo's conference this week were Chocobo Racing and Puzzle Bobble, and there was no dates attached to either.

With regards to games that are being released for systems that actually exist as yet, check out yet another Squenix remake in SaGa 3, coming back to Japan for Nintendo DS in January 2011. This game is a remake of what we in the West know as Final Fantasy Legend III, one of those Game Boy games that was rebranded for North America because Squaresoft didn't think they could sell games that didn't have the Final Fantasy name. No word yet on whether it will make it back across the sea twenty years after its original Japanese release. Also still coming soon, but this time for PSP, is the Tactics Ogre remake. The Squenix store in Japan started preorders for a collector's pack, at the hefty price of about $120. It's got a soundtrack, a signed illustration, a deck of tarot cards and... wait for it... the actual game. Odds of it making it outside of Japan? Not much, I'd wager. There's a "new" trailer for The 3rd Birthday, which is really just the public release of a behind-closed-doors trailer shown at the Tokyo Game Show. As one should expect, it's got more information about the cast of characters and plot, and more gameplay than we've seen as yet. There's a link to an HD version in the comments at andriasang, and while it takes about ten years to load, it's is amazingly pretty for a PSP game and the music and gargantuan monsters really evoke the feel of the original Parasite Eve.

Back to the 3DS to wrap up, it seems that Hajime Tabata, director of Agito and The 3rd Birthday, thinks that the new Nintendo unit would be a good home for Before Crisis. Since this game has never been available to anyone outside of Japan, perhaps this is one overblown, self-aggrandizing rumor that we could all get behind? The real question is, will anyone look to buy this on a new handheld when the game itself will be almost seven years old by the time the 3DS even launches, let alone when a port could be complete?

Wrapping up with CoN news, I finally got around to automating the process to give people their five-year member awards. That only took like nine months.

Source: andriasang, SiliconEra

CoN member Death Penalty had a birthday last weekend, which we didn't get around to posting to the Greetings forum. We've all gotten a bit bad about that lately, haven't we? Of course, by now, you're probably wondering why that's any kind of CoN news. That's a good question, with a better answer: DP is, as of a few days ago, our newest staff member! He's part time right now, as he acclimates to his other new role, that of a college student, and we look forward to him getting started as both our new quizmaster and a copy editor for some upcoming projects we're working on.

Bottom line is this: DP's a pretty robust gamer, so you can expect some really good stuff coming up soon in our quizzes. With his help, we'll continue to beat on you and force you into poor scores for a long time to come, so be sure to congratulate DP on his new roles at CoN before you take next month's quizzes.

In other news, we gave a little bit of a bump for AmaCoN this week. If you use Firefox or Chrome, you can now add an AmaCoN search engine to your browser, and search for items any time you have your browser open. To use it, just visit AmaCoN. Once you're there, you can add the search to your browser by clicking the search engine icon near the earch box in the top right corner of Firefox, or, for either Firefox or Chrome, by clicking the link below the search box for your country. This is a bit of a clumsy process, I understand, but it should make things nice and easy for you, the shoppers, so give it a try and let me know if you have any problems!