News

*That aren't really sequels.

After all kinds of cheeky proding from Josh, I've decided to finally get my act together and do that news thing!

First off, what is already old news: the Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix release last week. The package deal includes a remake of the original KH game, KH: Re: Chain of Memories, and videos from the DS title 358/2 Days.

Next, we've a series of news regarding Bravely Default: Flying Fairy. The game, as you may remember, has been out in Japan for over a year now and selling/reviewing very well; earlier this spring, it was confirmed for a 2014 release stateside. Recently, however, a separate, enhanced version of the game has been announced - Bravely Default: For the Sequel - which will be released in lieu of the original outside of Japan (still in 2014). The enhancements are drawn in large part from a whole heap of player suggestions, making this a bit of a standard of late for Square Enix. Check out those two Siliconera links below if you'd like to see a taste of what the anticipated title will look like via comparisons to its original incarnation.

But here's where things can get confusing if you haven't been keeping up with your Square Enix handheld news lately. Bravely Default: For the Sequel isn't a sequel in itself; it's a version of the original improved in large part for the sake of making the also-recently-announced sequel-proper... about which we know little as of yet!

And now on to that other piece of Square Enix news, FFXIV: A Realm Reborn (all these colons in titles are cramping my style). As of only a few hours ago, digital sales of the game resumed for PC and PS3 after having been closed only a few days after its late-August release due to widespread complaints regarding excessive wait times. Square Enix apologized for what it described as 'unprecedented demand,' and has spent the last month adding new servers in order to increase overall capacity as well as capacity for individual Worlds (as well as refunding some of folks who got in on the party late).

How has the new title been received, you may ask? Places like Metacritic and Gamerankings are giving it scores in the mid-80s (out of a hundred), which isn't too shabby, especially when you consider the scores for the original FFXIV were about half that, and that (I assume) awful load times were taken into those considerations. But no need to trust them! Here's what our members had to say about its Beta phase. I know several of these folks have kept up with the game: what do you think?

Source: Siliconera, Siliconera, CVG

While we fall behind on news, we keep up on CoNcasts, so that's something. Wait... no, we're a week late on this episode of the CoNcast too, aren't we? Well, isn't that fabulous.

This is lucky episode thirteen, and as luck would have it, we couldn't manage to get a full set of four this week. What's going on in the world? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria! Carrying on, though, Tiddles, lasz and I took it upon ourselves to put out a good show talking about some of the big hardware news that has come out recently, as well as the upcoming Tokyo Game Show. We cover the updated Playstation 4 release date in Japan, the announcement of the Vita TV, and the interestingly-shaped Nintendo 2DS, some of the big games we expect to see out of TGS, and we throw in a lot of silliness about fast food and other random topics.

To wrap up both this news post about the podcast and the recording itself, we announce the opening of the CoNcast mailbag. If you've got something to harass us about specific to the CoNcast, such as an argument against something we said, a topic you want us to cover, or a plea to join us on an upcoming episode, the mailbag is the place to do it. You can yell at us via email using [email protected]; of course, we'll be happy to take your feedback through any of our other points of contact as well, but the email address will be the most direct and noticeable way to make your opinion heard.

If you're feeling lucky yourself, download it now. If you're feeling less than lucky, that's probably all the more reason to hit that link.

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

In this episode, we're talking about sequels. It seems like every game is guaranteed a sequel these days, and some of them are warranted, and some are not. Of course, which ones are which are a matter for debate, so Neal, lasz, DP, and I spend some time talking about games that need more sequels, and games that instead need to be put on the shelf.

We even talk about Final Fantasy and Square Enix a bit, but, spoiler alert: nobody actually says that Final Fantasy should be a series that dies with a whimper. Why not? You'll have to listen.

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

The Square Enix news tidbits have been on hi-ya-toos for way, way too long. It's hard to get back on that wagon, so it's a fine time to remind the readers that we'll gladly solicit news from any of you out there. We generally ask that you be marginally literate, but we're flexible.

So, what have we missed recently? Well, plenty of Squenix news, of course, but really, not that much. As we all know, the times between E3 and Tokyo Game Show can be a bit quiet for the company, and the biggest releases coming up in the near future for the Japanese giant aren't quite yet here. That said, let's spend some time on those releases now, starting with A Realm Reborn. The Final Fantasy XIV reboot will be released for PC and PlayStation 3 in just a couple days, now; in fact, those with early access to the release should be getting it in a matter of hours.

To keep the appetite up for the game, Squenix have been showing quite a bit of video. A couple days back, a video premiered showing off more than a half-dozen high-level dungeons in different environments, complete with some requisite big evil like dragons, Marlboros, and Tonberries. Everyone's favorite, Magitek Armor, even makes an appearance towards the end. More recently (today, in fact!), another video came out, this time giving the glamour treatment to Primals, the name given to high-level bosses in the game. These, too, look pretty brutal - an enormous behemoth at the beginning might be the least impressive beast shown.

The next big (brand-new) release for the company once XIV is out the door is, of course, Lightning Returns. This game has had what seems like dozens of small parcels of data revealed over the time since its announcement; this week, another trailer came out, featuring a lot of combat, a fair chunk of Sazh, and a pretty blunt question: who will you save, and who will you sacrifice? Much further back in history, the company also made public that Vanille would appear in the game, under the protection of a religious faction in control of one of the game's four unique continents. The same article revealing Vanille also mentions a bit about shopping in the game, and how one will be able to buy real battle equipment but also fashion accessories for Lightning in the game's stores.

In news that will be potentially extra-interesting to those who enjoyed our Seiken Densetsu 3 podcast, Squenix have registered for trademarks on "Rise of Mana" in both Europe and Japan. The Mana series has obviously been one of the most extensive for Square in the last twenty years, behind only Final Fantasy, so it's no big surprise that something else would be showing up in that series; however, given that there's no other information, and the company's recent track record with their use of legacy IPs, this could well be a social game.

So, we can't really cover everything, of course, not when we sit on news for a month before posting it. So, let's wrap up with some fun merch news! Since everyone loved All the Bravest, of course, they'd probably want some keychains, right? Maybe a set of twenty-nine? No joke, some of those would be pretty great to have, but you can only buy the whole set at once, and the retail price comes out to about a hundred and ten dollars American. So... let me know how they turn out when you get yours. And, since I can't let Slime-related merchandise slip past me, despite not having played a Dragon Quest game in, like, twenty-five years, let's wrap with that. Here's a USB-based controller that looks like a fat DualShock 2 with a bunch of Slimes on it. It's currently only for Japan, and is listing at $40 equivalent, which is a bit steep. But, it's USB, so there are no importing issues if you simply must have it; however, if you want a wired controller for your PC, you really can't do any better than the one you can already get for an Xbox 360.

Let's call that a day for these tidbits. I know you all, you stopped reading paragraphs ago, right? If not, we'll try to keep up on the news a little better going forward!

Source: Siliconera, CVG, Nintendo Enthusiast

As promised earlier today, we've got a nice little snippet of a podcast for you. It's shorter than usual, and probably a little more roughly edited, but we wanted to give folks some media to listen to both because it's a big day for us here at CoN, but also because I'm going on vacation soon and didn't want to leave our many subscribers hanging.

Today's episode, in honor of both CoNniversary and the relaunch of the Final Fantasy VI section, is just about how great Final Fantasy VI really is. Obviously, this could cover a great many podcasts (and over time, I suspect it will!), but for today we just wanted to talk a little, in broad strokes, about the things that made us all fall in love with it over the years. For this, we got the original CoNcast group together for the first time in a few months, and I, Tiddles, lasz and DP spend an afternoon touching on a few things that keep us coming back to the game.

This one is a nice quick listen, so if you've never tried one of our podcasts before, or just love Final Fantasy VI, you should give it a try in honor of the site's 16th birthday. Let us know what you think and we'll be back with a new episode in a few weeks!

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

No pomp, no circumstance this CoNniversary, sorry. We've been a machine of late, and that carries over to this year's birthday message. Of a one-track mind, that is to say, and that track has been directed at taking the oldest game content on the site and making it fantastic. The results of such labors, again years in the making, are visible now: the Final Fantasy VI section of the Caves of Narshe is now cooking at a far higher temperature than ever before.

This section was actually, in the end, kind of a blast to do. It was painfully hard to keep going at times, but I think that everyone who worked on this as hard or even harder than I did would probably agree that doing this work rekindled our love for a game that deserves all the love it gets. We got so excited, in fact, that we even got the original CoNcast crew together to do a quick-hit recording today to talk just a little bit about how great FF6 is, and I am guessing that the next episode might well cover more of the same. Today's episode will get its own newspost later in the day so you can download it, don't worry!

As is obvious, Final Fantasy VI was the first game we ever covered. While we updated the content considerably during the creation of CoN5 over a decade ago, this new release marks the pinnacle of our coverage for what is, for better or worse, our flagship game. Djibriel, yet again, supplied the bulk of the content from his fantastic walkthrough, while Death Penalty, EvilEye and a multitude of others worked with me to make that content uniquely CoN's. And it is that, to be sure; the quality of the content has improved in a way that's barely measurable (in the good direction!), while the technology driving it remains the standard that other Final Fantasy sites still have not managed to match after all these years. We've continued to improve the technology running the game coverage sections, and we have spun out nearly a dozen miniguides for FF6 that extend our coverage well beyond a simple walkthrough and equipment pages.

Indeed, after all these years. This is the site's sixteenth birthday, and as it now can legally drive in some locales, it continues to trundle along like the lorry it is. Note: I'm using that metaphor so I can ignore the fact that the site could consent to... other things in many places at this same age. Anyway, at least in terms of the vibrancy of the site itself, I feel as if things are a bit resurgent. In the past two years, we've revamped two huge sections of the site; not only that, you'll of course remember this time last year when we finally released the fantastic Skyglade to make the site faster and more fashion-forward. While the community aspect of the site remains difficult to maintain through the splintering and segmenting of Final Fantasy and Square Enix fans as a whole (note my thoughts in the first CoNcast for more on that), I maintain that our core community is of the highest quality, and while we don't attract the most new users of anyone, we certainly continue to attract many of the brightest and most clever, due largely to our passion and commitment to the cause. Thanks to you all, this day and every one before and after.

So what's next? Well, hopefully we can get back to posting news more frequently as we won't be in crunch time for FF6. We've got some new updates to the site planned for the next year or so, and I'll be working hard in the near future to improve the user experience behind the scenes by way of fixing a variety of minor bugs in the site and also improving the CoN development webserver to (hopefully) make future work smoother.

Okay, so perhaps this counts for some pomp and circumstance. I'm flowery when I write, I just can't help it. Enjoy your CoNniversary with us!