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Looks like Squenix released some of the very first character renders for Crystal Chronicles yesterday. The renders, apparently by a Toshiyuki Itahama, all look more than just a little bit creepy. Kinda like some sort of demonic-looking dolls I would have been scared of as a kid, or last week. The center male and female remind me a bit of Zidane and Garnet, too.

The quality of these renders is on par with anything recent the company has done on PS2, but how will the in-game graphics match up on the two competing systems?

The tidbits about this game keep trickling in, but nothing seems to be concrete enough to form a real pre-launch opinion, in my mind. We really need to start seeing some more detail soon, especially with the Japanese launch looming.

Sorry we're a bit late on this one - Squenix released about a week ago a trailer for their first outing on the NGC, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles.

For those who haven't been following this game, FF:CC is another offshoot game that carries the Final Fantasy name, similar to Mystic Quest or Tactics. This one looks to play more like the recent Zelda games, though. The game is classed as an "Action RPG", and, for the first time, true multiplayer will be included.

I believe the video weighs in at about 14.5 MB, and is in Quicktime format. Enjoy!

Watching the video, for me, actually built a little interest in this game that I didn't have before. It's surely a striking game visually, but that shouldn't surprise anyone. If the music in-game is as strong as what Squenix put in the trailer, CC will certainly have a soundtrack worth possessing, too.

I mean, wow. Something that I NEVER thought would occur evidently has. After being listed for five years on the Yahoo search directory, CoN has been elevated to the "most popular" category for Final Fantasy sites. You'll notice that we are in that listing with none other than FFOnline and the Compendium.

I am sure that this enhanced listing will help our traffic, and I thank every one of you who comes here via Yahoo for making this possible.

If you'd like to see the listing, simply search for Final Fantasy at Yahoo's main page, and click to the "Final Fantasy Series" directory, or you may visit the listing pages directly. Please do click the link to come back here, so we can maintain our status as popular. Thanks again!

The host screwed up this morning and changed opgaming.com's disk quota. Changed it so much we were over it. The stupid problem has now been fixed. Sorry for all the outages lately.

We've opened the new section of CoN that will display game reviews that our loyal forumgoers write. What makes this different than the reviews you might see on other sites is that you know the author. You interact with him or her in chat, or on these forums.

By being able to identify the author of these reviews, you'll know which reviews are most likely to mesh with your own personal views. You'll know that if a person whose opinon you respect gives a game high marks, that you can probably trust it.

The reviews are available at http://www.cavesofnarshe.com/reviews/ . You can also connect with them from the menu of each game, or you can get a list of all reviews on the right-side navigation of every page outside the forums.

The forum contains directions on submitting a review for inclusion on the site, so read that if you are interested.

Sorry, we didn't have time to get the FFV walkthrough up before launch. However, we do have it done now, and you can now check out another of Darrk Phoenix' excellent walkthroughs here.

The navigation is a bit spotty so far, but we're working on it. It's still perfectly useable and has the CoN-exclusive "w" technology, so you can look up stats on any enemy and any item you come across during the chapters.