News

As of yesterday, the newest addition to Nintendo's DS handhelds was given an official Japanese release date and price; it will be available in Japan on February 26, 2011 in two stylin' colors: blue and black. Er, Aqua Blue and Cosmos Black. As for the price, the 3DS is set to sell for the Japanese equivalent of $300.

If that sounds steep to you, don't get too worried just yet: it's almost certainly due for a price cut when released in the US market (our own humble site founder has estimated a price of $250: don't make him wrong, Nintendo), which should be sometime in March 2011.

In case you've forgotten how this news pertains to CoN, there are several Square Enix titles in development for the 3DS. The original Kingdom Hearts game will be getting a 3D port-sorta. The Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises will also be making eventual appearances on the handheld, in addition to Chocobo Racing 3D.

Also, there's a little something called Kid Icarus: Uprising on the horizon that a few members may or may not be marginally interested in...

Source: Kotaku, IGN

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!

Announced early this morning at TGS, Disgaea 4 will be available for Japanese PS3 gamers on February 4th, 2011. The sprites and visuals are HD-quality (one of the major knocks against Disgaea 3 was its muddy visuals), tower attacks are crazier than ever, and D4 looks to further expand the SRPG insanity of Nippon Ichi's signature series to new heights. The game will also boast unrevealed "network features" that could be anything from leaderboards to versus or co-op multiplayer. No specifics on the network features were disclosed at the presentation.

The main character's a vampire named Valbadose, who's trying to overthrow his Netherworld's Overlord. Other characters shown at the end of the trailer are a man with a wolf's tail, a teenage girl and young boy wearing Prinny hats, and Axel from Disgaea 2. The presence of the vampire and wolf-boy have led some fans to suggest that Disgaea 4 could contain a parody of the Twilight film series in some way (God help us).

Expect more information to come from Nippon Ichi as the game nears its Japanese release date of February 4th, 2011.

Source: Disgaea 4 trailer (YouTube)

Got an iPhone? Love Final Fantasy Tactics? As we reported back during E3, Square Enix is bringing FFT and Secret of Mana to the iPhone (and, presumably at some point, the iPad).

Well, the announced release date for the game, 15 September, has now come and gone, and word has come today that the game has obviously been delayed, and no new release date has been announced as yet.

Frankly, I forgot this was coming out, because I still haven't finished my PSP game. I don't really need it for my iPhone. Hope it's not to disappointing for any of you wanting it, though, particularly if you were waiting for it on the iPad.

Source: Gizmodo

In addition to the pre-TGS news we shared the other day, Square Enix has been releasing more info over the course of the week in preparation for the weekend's open-to-the-public exhibits. The bottom line for all of this is that Square Enix is showing some major love to PSP at this Tokyo Game Show, and that smugglers inside the show are bringing out some video that people have been waiting a very long time to see.

On Wednesday, some early screenshots from the Tactics Ogre remake for PSP showed up on andriasang. They're nothing really unexpected, but they do look great, pretty much exactly as fans should expect them to look. However, yesterday out of TGS came a blowout of screens and information for upcoming PSP releases, including the announcement of the Japan-only Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Final Mix, and a few more screens from The 3rd Birthday. Additionally, more info was released for [duodecim], the new Dissidia game. First, there will be small product-code tie-ins between [duodecim] and the two aforementioned games, which will allow Lightning to dress up as Aya Brea, and Cloud to change from his Final Fantasy VII look to his Kingdom Hearts costume. It's doubtful that these codes will make the leap to the West, though, as the Final Mix game won't even be released here. [duodecim] also showed a control chart at TGS, for players wanting to try the beta in the booth. andriasang reports that the controls are pretty similar to that of the original. Something new, though, is that Lightning will be bringing her Paradigm Shifts to the Dissidia series - no word yet as to whether other characters might get a similar additional battle system.

Moving away from the PSP somewhat, there's good news for people who still want to see Final Fantasy Versus and Agito XIII. A YouTube user at the show was able to record video from the Squenix booth for both games, and while Square Enix successfully got them yanked from YouTube already, the cat is in fact out of the bag and Kotaku has the videos hosted currently. They may not last up there, either, though, so check them out quick, unless you just want to wait for the non-shakycam official releases that are sure to be forthcoming. Versus shows off some running and jumping, and a battle against a pretty awesome looking Behemoth; Agito shows the more standard cutscenes and battle system that one would expect from the JRPG line. Both are quite short. If you do want to wait for the official discussion of these games straight from Squenix, though, you won't be waiting all that long - it appears that the company will have a conference to display the entire Fabula Nova Crystallis series on 11 January, 2011.

With the press days of TGS now over, I suspect that the news from TGS is all but over as well. However, if you hear anything over the weekend, let us know!

Source: andriasang, Kotaku

With Final Fantasy XIV in open beta for quite a while now, there's a lot of information on the game out there. Since it's set to release for PC on September 30, I figure a bit of a review of what we know so far is in order.

Final Fantasy XIV looks like it has a several interesting tweaks within the game that set it apart from the standard MMO. First, there's the flexibility of the class system. A player can apparently switch their class by simply switching their equipment: thus, a player can switch at will between a spellcaster, a physical attacker and something boring, like a botanist. It also appears that, once you've reached a certain level of mastery, your character will be able to use one class' abilities while being actually equipped as a different class. (I.e. a physical attacker who is capable of casting a spell or two. Or whatever it is that botanists do.) Regardless, this seems to at least answer R51's confusion with that whole tailor-class business.

Quests are built towards specific classes, so that a player can select quests based on what pertains to their character. It also looks like the difficulty of enemies can vary quite a bit depending on location.

Aside from what we already know about weekly leveling limits, Square Enix has put in additional checks to prevent players from going level-crazy. According to this fellow over at IGN, there are several aspects of the game (such as a relatively limited number of solo quests) that encourage/force the player to enter into multiplayer pursuits or explore additional areas of the game.

The game also appears to be shooting towards a high level of realism, especially in the less battle-oriented classes. There is an economy of sorts within the game, and players can not only harvest natural resources of a wide variety but fashion them into, uh, stuff as well.

The reviewer at IGN speaks highly of the combat system in FFXIV. Powerful moves require TP (tech points?) while magic requires MP (duh). There is also a stamina bar, which gradually drains when executing standard attacks. Upon leveling up, the player is able to assign points to all the standard categories (attack power, magic power, defense, magic defense, etc.).

The game isn't without its flaws, of course. Apparently, there is a bit of redundancy involved in the non-combat classes (which is probably to be expected). This reviewer also is a bit frustrated with the teleporting system (teleporting requires a large number of Anima points, which also regenerate slowly), as well as having to manually reassign the character's abilities after switching classes.

The biggest problem that I saw, however, was the issue of hardware. Like R51 mentioned earlier, you're going to want to have a pretty decent machine if you want to be running FFXIV at the ideal level. It isn't exactly clear how much the game is compromised by a less-than-perfect PC (even when run at lower graphics settings), but it sounds like there'll be a fair bit of lagging involved.

That said, Square Enix still has a bit of time to try to clear up some of this stuff before the game is released at the end of the month. Personally, I think that most of these smaller issues can be forgiven so long as they try to do something with the game's playability on less-than-jacked PCs.

All the information in this news post is based off of the below-linked IGN article (I haven't been in Beta, and nor have the staff to the best of my knowledge). If you're someone who has played the Beta firsthand, though, why not chirp in with anything interesting you've found and/or your opinions?

Source: IGN