News

The fourth main-series entry in Tri-Ace's series of RPG space odysseys is in the works, according to a recent article in Famitsu magazine. Evidently SO4 has been in production for quite a long time - the storyboards are already finished and most of the basics of the battle system are already in place. More information will be revealed at the upcoming Tokyo Game Show,

Unfortunately, one object of concern was missing from the Famitsu article - the platform on which Star Ocean 4 will be playable. The source article stated that SO4 will be on a system "capable of displaying beautiful visuals," but this is too vague a statement to make any conclusions.

But console concerns aside, the article reveals some promising details. The battle system is to be made in the Star Ocean tradition and characters and races from earlier games are confirmed to make appearances. Assistant producer Hajime Kojima stated that the previous games never felt like a true star ocean - Star Ocean 4 will feature outer space segments, spaceship battles, and a huge world containing several planets instead of only two or three. The game's protagonist is a blonde boy named Edge Maverick, and the game's principal heroine is his childhood friend Reimi.

There is currently no release date, no platform, and virtually no other information regarding Star Ocean 4 at this time - at least until we learn more at the Tokyo Game Show on the 20th of September.

Source: RPGFan

Last Monday, Square-Enix launched an English-language online store full of merchandise dedicated to various games. Most of the merch seems to be figurines, jewelry, and other accessories. This marks the first time that many of these items are available directly to the US market, if at hilariously high prices.

Source:
RPGFan
The Store

Square-Enix's penchant for remaking their most popular games has been obvious since Final Fantasy III appeared in glorious 3D on the Nintendo DS. In fact, all of the 8- and 16- bit have found their way onto one of Nintendo's handhelds, with a totally new remake of FFIV also on its way. With our favorite series apparently tapped out, what's next?

The answer is SE's other RPG series: Dragon Quest.

According to screenshots from Shonen Jump, remakes are underway for Dragon Quest IV, V, and VI. It appears that graphics will be redone in the vein of FFIII/FFIV.

Will these games make it out of Japan? Square-Enix isn't saying. The series has never been as popular in the United States as it is in Japan, but some of the more obscure series titles have made its way here--Rocket Slime is already available on the DS, with a Wii title and another DS title on the way. Until we have a press release, though, here's hoping!

Source: GameSpot

Ten years, but the same format for the anniversary message. Random discussion, personal message, future forthcoming fun. Don't skip ahead, please. This took me a while.

There are a lot of people out there who don't understand all the things that go into creating a website. Among those, there are even fewer who actually care, I'm sure. But for lack of a better topic, I'm going to give you a little taste of all the pieces and how they fit together. It's more relevant than you think, since the site is today celebrating a barely-precedented tenth birthday, and I think it's important for all of you to know just how we roll here. Plus it's good for my ego.

I've been a part of a lot of sites over the years, both epic and minute in scale. But the principles in play to make a good one are the same regardless of the size. You have to have someone in place to design the thing in a way that looks good and draws the user in. A good design is just designed enough to be fancy without making the site hard to use. Even more important than that is the content, of course, regardless of what some people might try to tell you. Trust me, those that say that presentation is better than content are those who have lousy content. To have meaningful content, you need to bring something to the table that's both relevant to your audience and is somehow different than what everyone else has. Kids, note that, it's why nobody reads your blogs.

Now, if you want to have a moderately successful site, you can stop there. Nobody would blame you - bringing those two things together alone is quite a feat. But you can keep going. You can market the site, to really give those users who show up something to tell their friends about and to keep them all coming back. You can make the site interactive, so it's not just people showing up to read; give them something to really wrap their hands around. You can begin to focus on refinement, not just creation. You'll learn terms like information architechture, the art of designing your content so it's neatly organized and webbed together in a way that makes it easy for your users to access everything. You'll figure out how to analyze metrics to make sure people are seeing what you want them to, and also that you're giving them the new things that they come to your site to find. And, you learn that from time to time you might have to just burn the whole thing down and build it back up from scratch.

This is relevant because, for the last ten years, we here at the Caves of Narshe have been trying like mad to do all these things in an effort to bring the best Final Fantasy content possible straight to you. Ten years ago, it was just me, sitting at a Pentium-60 with a thousand-page HTML book, and CoN was nothing more than something for me to learn a new hobby. Five years ago, it was a handful of us, most of whom are still here, rushing like crazy folk to get Caves of Narshe version 5.0, the look and feel that you'll now know as "Persona," online. And now, it's a thriving group of people dedicated not only to gaming and Final Fantasy, but also to bringing the love of the most classic Final Fantasy games to the masses. We haven't all been doing it for a decade (though, some days it feels like it, right, guys?), but we are still here because we do it better. All of it.

I think I thank you all pretty... much... every... year, but can you ever get enough of it? I have a lot to thank you for, really. You guys are the ones that come to the site and post at the forums, and come to chat, and generally appreciate the work that we all do for you here. That alone is a lot of the reason that we keep doing this. You guys are the ones that shop at AmaCoN, and every little thing that you guys buy helps pay the bills a little bit. Those of you who talk to me often know I'm cheap, so all those little purchases keep me motivated too! And some of you guys, well, you're the ones that tick me off and incur my wrath. And, in your own little irritating way, by God you all keep me around and active too.

So this year I want to thank absolutely everyone. Not just our oldest members, not just our newest members, not just my staff, but everyone who reads this. That includes you, GoogleBot. It's really a lot more personal than I think it's easy to say, but I'm going to try. Ten years ago, I had no idea that a collection of webpages was going to become a career. I was just killing time one summer, the kind of time you have to kill when you live in the middle of nowhere. Since that day ten years ago, caves and mines and holes in the ground have followed me everywhere. The site went with me to University. The site was there when I got engaged, and later married. The site followed behind when I moved halfway across the country. The Caves got me my first web job, and that was a bare three years ago. I daresay the site will be with me forever—even if one day it does not exist on the web, the education it provided and the people it brought to me will.

The lessons I learned in creating and refining this site also got me my current job, and I don't think anyone who knows me or my line of work would doubt that I've come to benefit significantly from that little turn of events. Take that full circle: I have a fulfilling and happy life, old-man grousing notwithstanding, and a major reason why is because I've been here at CoN for ten years.

I don't expect that you folks out there have had this sort of life-changing experience due to any website, let alone our humble little nook of the internets here. But hey, maybe you should stick around. Post at the forums. Chat with us about random things. Maybe you even want to help out at the site a little, who can say? Maybe in a few years you'll have the same depth of love for this site and what it means that I do. Or maybe you will go out on your own, and start checking out all that gibberish I wrote about a few paragraphs back. If you do, drop me a line ten years down the road. Let me know how it works out for you, and I'll be proud to know I played a small part, just as I hope you all are proud of the parts you have all played here over the years.

So, that's it. Ten years, complete and in the books. And the ledger says that on balance, a fine profit was had by all. But we're clearly not done yet. You'll notice today that our wizard Tiddles has just finished refreshing all the skins for the site and the forums, giving everything a fresh and time-consuming coat of paint. Of course, we've got the CoNtests running, and we plan to have more coming soon as well. The future, in fact the quite-near future, holds even more! We promise that even though it's now been ten years, we will keep you posted on the new stuff if you keep coming to check it out. At Caves of Narshe, we may no longer be just starting, but we're a long way from finishing.

We finally got to the end! After weeks of educated and completely uneducated guessing, it's finally time to present the winners of the CoN Name That Tune quiz game. We had a great turnout of over fifty participants, though not everyone was able to participate each of the three weeks, and the final round was incredibly close, with the difference between first and second place only a matter of minutes taken. From our final round of participants, I'm happy to announce our winners:

• First Place: The_Pink_Nu1


• Second Place: Sherick


• Third Place: FallingHeart


• Special Prize, drawn from all participants: Archetype

As promised, each winner is getting right away, via email, a gift certificate to be used at AmaCoN. As always, supporting CoN by buying everything you can through AmaCoN will feed the beast and allow us to do more and more contests in the future.

And speaking of which, we've got an easy contest for you now, again to celebrate this week's Tenth Anniversary of CoN. We've got ten four by six inch prints of the Caves of Narshe logo just waiting to be mailed to you, and all you need to do is click a button to be in the running to get one. I can't put the button right here, but here's the next best thing: a link to the easy signup page. If you participated in the last CoNtest, you're already in, so don't worry. We'll draw the winners on 12 August!

And one last thing for now: did you miss signing up for Name That Tune? Or did you participate, but want more quizzes? Well, everyone can now play for fun, all eight rounds of quizzes are now open to everyone, and will be for the next month. Just go back to the Name That Tune homepage and kick it back out!

More to come this week, so stay tuned.

Namco Bandai's flagship franchise of RPGs, the Tales Of series, just got a bit more crowded. Earlier today we learned of a new entry to the series on the DS, a highly-anticipated sequel on the Wii, a director's cut of a recent remake, and a port to the PSP.

First off is Tales of Innocence for the DS. The game will ship in Japan before 2007 ends, and is being made by the same team that makes the Radiant Mythology games. Also, the DS has been declared officially as the "lead platform" for the Tales Of series, so we can assume to see a great many more DS Tales games in the future; hopefully they won't be made in the tradition of 2006's universally panned Tales of the Tempest.

In addition to Tales of Innocence, there was an announcement for a director's cut of the PS2 remake of Tales of Destiny, which began life as the second game in the Tales series and the first on the Playstation. We don't know what new features will be present in this re-release of a remake, and it's hard to say when we will; the game has an unspecified 2008 release date in Japan.

Thirdly, there was an announcement for a PSP port of Tales of Rebirth, a 2004 PS2 game that never had a Western localization. ToR is notable for being the first Tales game to use fewer bright colors and more realistic character anatomy than most of its predecessors; design-wise, it essentially bridges the gap between the art styles of Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss. There is no announcement yet for a Western release of this PSP port, but it is also scheduled for an unspecified 2008 release date in Japan.

Lastly, Namco Bandai announced a sequel that is sure to excite many Tales fans: Tales of Symphonia: Knight of Ratatosk for the Nintendo Wii. It is set to take place two years after the events of Tales of Symphonia with in the same world, but starring two new main characters. It is unknown what roles the original cast of Tales of Symphonia will play, but it is safe to assume that they won't be completely absent from the game.

So that's four new games announced from this well-milked franchise, including a new stand-alone title and a sequel to one of the series' most popular entries. 2008 looks to be a very busy year for Tales Of.

Source: RPGamer