News

Those of you who frequent the Site Submissions section of the forums may have already noticed, and read, Zephir's recent FF4 fanfic, titled "A Day in the Lives..." If not, you can check out our FF4 Fanfiction Section to read this story for yourself.

It deals with Palom and Porom, and is very amusing.

More fanfiction will be going up in the near future, for various authors.

Sammy, the Japanese gaming that tried to merge with Sega last year and already owned around 25% of the company's stock, has bought out the rest of Sega outright for $1.45 billion. The combined will be known as Sega Sammy Holdings.

The company will have a strong presence in all areas of gaming entertainment: console gaming, pachinko, "pachislot" (pachinko/slot machines), amusement, arcade games, and the content services market. Sammy, in fact, is the largest Pachinko machine manufacturer in the world. There are plans to have the company organized into four main divisions by 2007: pachinko and pachislot, amusement and consumer games, media content and network, and miscellaneous. Until that time, Sega and Sammy will continue to run as if separate companies. Sammy's financial strength and Sega's creativity will be the key to the whole company as it predicts an income of $4.4 billion for the fiscal year of 2005


Source: Gamespot

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Hopefully, Sammy will not pull Sega out of the console market. I don't have the exact quote at the moment, but I remember that around the time of the attempted merger last year that one of the high executives of Sammy said that Sega needed "to focus on the arcade market more than home console market."

On the other hand, Sammy's financial strength may allow Sega to devote more resources to their console games than they have been able to as of late.

It was two years ago today that Final Fantasy XI launched in Japan. Playonline has taken the opportunity to compile a massively detailed census of the activity occuring on the game's servers.

To begin, the number of FFXI active customers has broken the 500,000 mark. The 500,000+ figure does not include those accounts using their free trial. It is just paying customers. These 500k customers have accounted for over 1,200,000 registered characters, or an average of about 2.5 characters per customer. Exploring this deeper, it can be seen that Japanese customers average 3-4 characters while their North American counterparts only average 1-2.

34% of these characters are at level 1. The vast majority of these level 1 characters are used for item storage, synthesis, or gardening. (Note: Maybe some of the CoN's FFXI players could explain this in further detail). 60% of the game's characters are level 20 or lower (this is not including the level 1 characters discussed earlier even) . Over 51% of the characters have the warrior job class chosen as their main job. The warrior class is also one of the most popular support jobs as well.

One final note of interest that the census displays is that there is never really a downtime for the game. There is always a numerous amount of players to venture out with no matter what time one wants to play. This is because North America and Japan playing levels peak at different times, the former peaking at noontime of the latter.

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What I found most interesting about the census is the vast amount of people playing the game. I'm sure I'd find the other data more engaging if I actually played the game. I recommend checking out the link posted at the beginning of this update to those who found this interesting. The playonline site features much more in depth data than I went into here.

The results of the Gogo Fanfiction Contest (this past Feb 18th to April 18th) are in. As stated previously, the prize is a custom title, lasting two months.

The contest was for the best FF6 fanfiction that involved an NPC in FF6 as Gogo, such as Baram, Daryl, Gesthal, etc, with a convincing story of why this is.

And, without further ado, the winner is...

*drumroll*

Del S with Unavenged Dead!

His fanfic can be read in the the FF6 Fanfiction Section. Del can contact R51, Neal, Tiddles or Elena99 anytime regarding his prize.

Second place was MogMaster, with "Gogo Fanfic".

Full Metal Alchemist, the anime that both Square Enix and Bandai have been working on, is a smashing success in Japan according to Anime News Network.com Already up to episode 31, it has a cast of popular characters, wonderful themes, and unconventional plots, with a new twist on Alchemy that hasn't been seen often, if at all, in an anime.

It's so big that profits from the manga itself are one of the top three sources for all the extra funding that Square-Enix has sitting around, the other two being the recent FFX-2, and Dragon Quest V.

Furthermore, for those of you who haven't had a chance to see it yet, Full Metal Alchemist was licenced at E3, meaning that soon there will be an Americanized version to air on CN this October. Let's hope that it's for Adult Swim, so too much Americanization and editting doesn't need to happen.

Second article source: ign.com

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I really love this anime, and have been watching it since the fansubs first started coming out. I'm glad to see that it's been finally licenced, I've been wondering when that was going to happen. Although I don't have high hopes of CN being nice to it, editting wise, I'm sure that DVDs for the anime will soon follow, as well as translated manga.

Now on the site, in the FF6 Fanfiction Section is the newest complete fanfiction by Zephir, who is currently working on two others that can be found in the Site Submissions section.

As with his last piece, Ikiiri does not centre around a main character from the game. Instead, Zephir has created a whole new species to grace the world of FF6. This is a sad, yet satisfying, tale of a young female named Ikiiri, who is trying to make sense of the world around her.

In other fanfiction news, the results of the Gogo Fanfiction Contest are in, and will be posted in the near future.