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After too much waiting for a game that doesn't require any real localization at all, Amazon.co.uk now has a release date for Final Fantasy IV DS; it's September 5, 2008. Of course, that's coming up in just over three weeks, which really makes sense given that there wasn't any real localization necessary. As usual, AmaCoN tries hard to get all preorders to you on the actual release date of the game, so you won't have to wait: order now.

The other new release dates for the day are for the new Harvest Moon games, for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii, subtitled "Island of Happiness" and "Tree of Tranquility" respectively. While the Harvest Moon series has always been a bit niche, even for a series that has been going on for over a decade, I know there are quite a few fans who might be looking to pick these games up; if you're one of them, you can preorder now for a DS release on August 26 and a Wii release on September 16. Not only that, Amazon preorders for these games pack in farm animal plushies as bonuses. So, uh, get your farm... animals?

Final Fantasy Dissidia actually had some footage released recently, ahead of it's projected December 2008 Japanese release date. Dissidia is described as an action-based fighting game with RPG elements and featuring two characters from each of the first 10 games, a protagonist and a villain. Overall, though, it's likely to be the FF answer to Super Smash Bros. in that it features a number of characters from different universes fighting each other, and there might even be a plot this year.

What is known, is that the character list has a number of confirmed cast members. Not every game has both characters revealed yet, the bad guys being wheeled out for some games, but in those cases it's pretty blatant who the "Other" one will be, and in one case, the other one is a bit puzzling really. It's probably a safe bet to assume that on top of these 20 there may be secret characters as well, but don't count on it. And without further ado, here are the ones you can count on seeing.

From Final Fantasy: Warrior of Light and Garland
The Warrior of Light and Garland, though both fighters, have some differences. The former uses swordplay and shield, a possible balance between offensive and defensive play, whilst Garland has a sword that can become a battle axe, for an ever changing but from the look of it offence-heavy fighting style. The arena where they fight appears to be the Chaos Shrine, location of the final boss battle of Final Fantasy.

From Final Fantasy II: Firion and Emperor Mateus Palamecia
Firion's fighting style seems to revolve around versatility, able to change weapons mid-battle. He has access to swords, spears and bows amongst other weapons, a veritable walking armoury. Mateus meanwhile appears to use magical attacks predominately, and is able to transform into the Emperor of Hell. Their battleground seems to be Pandaemonium, capital of Hell and twinned with Cardiff.

From Final Fantasy III: Onion Knight and Cloud of Darkness
The Onion Knight is apparently able to change jobs mid-battle, with Sage and Ninja confirmed so far. Others are likely, but only those are confirmed. The Cloud of Darkness meanwhile is, in case you didn't know, actually a woman giving Ultimecia a run for her money in the "ridiculously revealing costume" stakes. Her appearance has altered to have pale instead of orange or green skin, but she can apparently transform into the green-skinned variation seen in FF3 DS. The fight between the two occurs in FF3's World of Darkness.

From Final Fantasy IV: Golbez
Confirmed in a trailer at Square Enix's DKΣ3713 event (The name referenced the games displayed and also is a fun game to guess exaclty which games it in fact had at it! Don't google, that's cheating.), nothing has been revealed about Golbez except his presence but it's likely he'll fight Cecil.

From Final Fantasy V: ExDeath
Like Golbez, nothing confirmed and revealed only in the trailer at DKΣ3713. Likely to fight Bartz.

From Final Fantasy VI: Kefka
Kefka's confirmation in the game came at, you guessed it, DKΣ3713, and tells us the same as it told us about Golbez and ExDeath, except that Kefka apparently hints at his opponent being female. It's probably safe to bet it's not Relm or a post-op Locke.

From Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth
No one should be surprised at this one. His opponent hasn't been announced but really, who was it the other seventy times they put him in a sequel or spin-off?

From Final Fantasy VIII: Squall and Ultimecia
Gunblade-wielding social recluse mercenary Squall fights with his Gunblade of course, and can use his Renzokuken attack as well as transform his weapon into the Lionheart. Ultimecia meanwhile uses swords and axes made from magic, as well as time manipulation and possibly even summoning and junctioning. Their battle occurs in Ultimecia's castle.

From Final Fantasy IX: Zidane and Kuja
The rules are simple. Two Monkey Enter, One Monkey Leave. The Genome brothers face off in Memoria, and apparently both use their Trance forms in combat.

From Final Fantasy X: Tidus and Jecht
Yeah, you read that right, Jecht. Not Seymour. Tidus fights his dad with his overdrives, whilst Jecht can transform into the Final Aeon, which might actually explain this somewhat bizarre pairing. The creators have stated they seek to use this as a "What-if" scenario as well as expand the interaction between the two characters.

From Star Wars: Nobody
And hooray for that.

Sources: Official Site
IGN videos and information on the game

Two games previously announced as being released only for mobile phones, Final Fantasy Agito XIII and The Third Birthday ("Parasite Eve 3"), are receiving PSP ports as early as 2009. Square-Enix disclosed this information at a private expo to media and select fans currently taking place,

Very few details are available on Agito XIII, but it is said to be an RPG with online elements and a cast of at least twelve characters. The promotional posters for Agito show a silver-haired character (no word on gender) holding a deck of cards. The Third Birthday is a spinoff of the cult favorite Parasite Eve series, starring Aya Brea several years after the events of Parasite Eve 2, dealing with an outbreak of monsters called The Twisted.

There is no official announcement for a release of either of these games outside of Japan, but here's one PSP-owning Parasite Eve fan keeping his fingers crossed.

Source: Kotaku
Also: Vampire pumpkins and watermelons

I'm going to keep this pretty short this year, for a lot of reasons. For one, in some ways this has been a pretty long and trying year for CoN, and there's no reason to dwell on stuff that's not awesome. For another, I know that a lot of you out there reading this are borderline illiterate, so why should I make life any harder for you than it already is?

Half of that statement above is certainly true. If you're not sure which half, you're likely in the "illiterate" group. I know that, for me and a pretty significant number of my staff, the last twelve months have been pretty trying both personally and professionally. For me in particular, CoN is both; so when we have a bit of a quiet year, like the one ending right now, it feels like quite a blow to the gut. Now, that said, it's not all doom and gloom for the magical CoN crew. We did pretty okay—I mean, we're all still mostly here. Right?

Seriouly, though, we're still a vital and active site, lack of obvious illustrations notwithstanding. Our daily average hit statistic has been trending up for the last year, which is something that really has never not been the case. We still pull a ton of traffic, and we even have managed to pop into the Alexa Top 100k again recently, several times, in fact. We even reached as high as about 84,000. Many of you might recall from way back in 2004 how big a deal that was; well, now there are even more sites on the internet, and we're still reaching higher into those rankings than we ever have before. For the statistically-minded, and especially for me, that's kind of a big deal. As CoN's "competition" slowly continues to slide into obscurity, we continue to assert our place as the one place where you can still find good data, and not be surrounded by people who just don't care any more.

It was a pretty tough year for new Caves development, so I know those of you who ache for more game coverage are probably pretty disappointed right now. We did, of course, manage to blast out the highly-touted Final Fantasy IV upgrade last October, which frankly is a jewel among our coverage. It's technologically advanced, and covers fifteen years of FF4's life. It even gives us a toehold into the truly excellent Nintendo DS remake, launched just nine days ago in North America. If you're a fan of our visual arts offering, too, you should see our new fanart section. Launched just last week, this new section does everything faster and better than the old one, and it will allow us, as it catches on, to get more new fanart to you guys much faster than before, and from many more games. For a site that isn't necessarily "about" fanart, I think we've put together a pretty wickedly robust offering there, and with it being so easy to rate, comment and submit, we definitely want you guys to get more involved.

So here's what we're going to do for 2008-2009. I'm going to quit my job (well, actually, I might just lose it, but it sounds like it has so much more bravado to say "quit," right?), and we're going to streamline our operations to make things faster and more efficient. This will take place via changes to staff, a reorganization of how we handle our projects, and simply by taking more knowledge from what we've done in the past. Our problem has always been that there is just so much fantastic stuff we want to offer you guys, we get bogged down. It's time for us to refocus our work and really work with you all to give you what you want as close to when you want it as humanly possible. We know we're good, and we know you're good, and we all know the site's good. So let's reinforce that fact over the next twelve months, and let's make sure that for all nine of us out there who still enjoy Final Fantasy, all nine of us are thinking of CoN with regards of how to interact with the community.

You all can still help, too. While we might not be looking for full-time staffers for quite a while, those of you who can help collect data, or test things, or do lots of various stuff, can always help and I will try to give more of my time to welcoming you to do it. There's nothing we do that's truly difficult (well, at least not the parts that we'd let anyone touch anyway!), so all you need is a bit of free time and the willingness to understand how things are done, and preferably the opportunity to hang out in chat and not make an arse of yourself while doing so. And if you can't do that, there's always AmaCoN. Even if you have never shopped online in your life, I would wager that you know someone among your friends or family who does. Get them to use AmaCoN; if you're not sure how, just ask. It's not a lie when I say that CoN gets more done when more AmaCoN money comes in, because the more money brought in to pay the site's expenses, the less time I have to spend soliciting freelance work and the more time I can use on improving the site. We want your money, of course. Who doesn't? But at least we want you to get cool stuff from it. We haven't asked for handouts since like 1999. Seriously.

All in all, we still feel that we have a lot to celebrate with this site. We want you to celebrate with us. Every (decent!) post you make is a little bit of celebration. So is every line of chat. So is every rating or comment on a fanart, and so is every time you tell your Facebook friends what a cool place CoN is; heck, you can check out our brand-new Facebook page to make it even easier to share! Help us celebrate the truly one-of-a-kind thing that is the CoN for the next year, and we'll meet again in 365 days to discuss our progress. And one final note, the big news this birthday is not just here. We've got new contests that will be posted... well, posted just below!

—R51

CoN Summer CoNtests

And here's your contest information! This summer, starting of course today, we're going to be running two contests for the creative folks here at CoN. One will be for new fanfiction stemming from one or more of our currently-covered games, and the other will be for fanart of characters from any Square-Enix game, depicting them on a hypothetical vacation. Submissions are open now, and will be open for some time. If you are interested, or know someone who is, check out our main CoNtests page to get more information. Remember, the only prerequisite to enter is that you be a CoN member.

In a surprise announcement, Square Enix president Yoichi Wada confirmed during Microsoft's E3 press conference today that Final Fantasy XIII is to be released on the Xbox 360, contrary to previous expectation that the title would be released exclusively for PlayStation 3. Wada spoke of his belief that this would broaden the game's availability to North American and European players, though neither he nor Microsoft's press release made any mention of a Japanese 360 release, leading to widespread speculation that the game may remain PS3-exclusive in that territory — news which no doubt has all six Japanese Xbox owners up in arms.

A Square-Enix press conference followed, during which producer Yoshinori Kitase and executive Shinji Hashimoto discussed further details:

• There may be differences between the versions due to the capacity difference between Blu-Ray and DVD. However, the current plan is to keep the content identical. One might speculate, therefore, that the 360 version may come on multiple DVDs.
• 360-specific development is set to begin following completion of the Japanese PS3 version, along with English translation.
• This is a relatively recent decision, largely based on the 360's wide installation base outside Japan. This seems to fit with the notion that the 360 version may not hit Japan.
• Uncategorised additional appendage FFXIII:VS will not be multiplatform. (Presumably just like FFXIII itself wasn't. Just saying.)

No release date has yet been announced, but Microsoft's press release indicates that the game will be available to 360 owners "at launch" in NA and the EU, which is presumably a quirky, press-release sort of way of saying it'll be out the same day for both consoles.

It's a good thing nobody bought an expensive, launch-era PS3 just for the promise of a Final Fantasy exclusive. Nobody did that, right?

Sauces:
Microsoft Press Release
Gamespot Story
Kotaku Liveblog (whatever that means) of the SE press conference
Tomato

...and even though we won't have all the details until E3, here's a preview to whet your appetite.

Let's get the big one out of the way: Final Fantasy XIII. Yes, they're still making it. ... That's about it. Anyone who thought that was headed anyone's way this year clearly doesn't remember how long it took the previous installment to make it to market, though, and, this time, there are two games to look forward to. With FFXIII/FFVsXIII still at least a year away, maybe it's time to branch off into some of Squenix's other offerings.

For 360 and PS3 owners, the next great RPG comes in the form of The Last Remnant. Microsoft's deal with the devil means that the game will be exclusive to the 360 for a limited time, but, never fear, Sony fans will eventually get a crack at it. The game will feature a new mixture between large-scale tactics and individual battle control in a quest to save the world.

Sadly, Microsoft might manage to hold onto Infinite Undiscovery. Due in September, it stars Capell (a boy who looks like a boy!) and Aya in a (surprise!) quest to save their world.

The return of the Star Ocean series is the next big thing looming on the horizon. While is seems that The Last Hope might end up a 360 exclusive, remakes of the first two games are slated for the PSP. Star Ocean: First Departure will be available in late October of this year, and Star Ocean: Second Evolution will launch in January 2009. Both games will feature enhanced graphics and sound over the originals, which were for the Super Famicom and PlayStation, respectively.

There's plenty for DS fans to look forward to, too. Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest IV will be making their remade ways to the handheld this winter, and a full remake of Final Fantasy IV is due at the end of this month.

Lastly, if you've always wanted to play an RPG on your iPod, now's your chance--Song Summoner has arrived. The title appears to be a tactical RPG that draws on your iPod playlist to create party members...or "Tune Troopers", as the case may be. If that sounds intriguing, it's only $4.99 to satisfy your curiosity.