News

Squenix, partnered with a French game company called Ankama, is coming out with a new Tactical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game called "Wakfu". It's free to play, and appears to be a sequel to Ankama's previous MMO, called Dofus. Wakfu takes place one thousand years after Dofus, and there will no doubt be all sorts of throwbacks to Dofus in-game in Wakfu, but as it's an MMO it's doubtful one will need to have played Dofus to enjoy Wakfu. An overview of the Dofus story can also be found at its wiki below, if anyone wants to read up on the history before they delve into Wakfu. Also, anyone who's interested can register for the beta at their website.

Squenix will be at the New York Comic Con on October 8-10 to announce their game, along with demos and giveaways like t-shirts, posters, and the like. The game itself has interesting characters like "warrior gamblers", "plant summoners", and "protectors" (of animals), as well as time-tested characters like archers, beserkers, regular warriors, and the like.

Finally, anyone who wants to take a look at the game but won't be at the Con can go to Wakfu's site, as they have screencaps, videos, and, if you're really excited about it, wallpapers. The release date is still TBA, though it's likely sometime in 2011.

Source: Wakfu Site, Wakfu Facebook, Dofus Wiki

That's right, the team behind FFXIII is interested in making a sequel (for better or for worse, as we learned with FFX)!

In an interview with Yoshinori Kitase and Motomu Toriyama, two of the important folks behind FFXIII, Kitase said that he would like to work on a game that could be referred to as FFXIII-2. The goal of such a game, according to Kitase, would be to explain "additional areas of the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythology" as well as help "players to better understand the FFXIII story."

Equally interesting is that the team behind FFXIII has already been grinding away at a new game. Toriyama hinted that this project would be another entry in the Fabula Nova Crystallis series, which would confirm speculations that Square Enix intends to introduce a new title in the series at their press conference this coming January.

The duo also said that the FFXIII team had intended to produce a large amount of downloadable additional material for the game (you may remember having heard this earlier). This ended up not panning out, but Kitase did say that his future titles would work to develop additional content from the beginning. They also mentioned that some of the added content originally intended for FFXIII could wind up in this mystery title currently in the works.

While it's beginning to look like Square Enix is building up for their Fabula Nova Crystallis press conference as much as Lebron James did for his signing announcement, I have to admit they've certainly hooked my interest.

Source: IGN

With all the news about the 3DS, it's clear that the Square Enix news of the week is going to be handheld-centric. Final Fantasy XIV has been out for Collector's Edition players for over a week now, so it's old news already. What's new is all the gaming on the go - hope you're prepared to take some road trips in the near future to accommodate it all.

Staying first with the week's general trend of the 3DS, it's worth noting that of all the franchises promised for the new Nintendo portable, Squenix isn't giving any release dates at all, yet. The only games officially presented at Nintendo's conference this week were Chocobo Racing and Puzzle Bobble, and there was no dates attached to either.

With regards to games that are being released for systems that actually exist as yet, check out yet another Squenix remake in SaGa 3, coming back to Japan for Nintendo DS in January 2011. This game is a remake of what we in the West know as Final Fantasy Legend III, one of those Game Boy games that was rebranded for North America because Squaresoft didn't think they could sell games that didn't have the Final Fantasy name. No word yet on whether it will make it back across the sea twenty years after its original Japanese release. Also still coming soon, but this time for PSP, is the Tactics Ogre remake. The Squenix store in Japan started preorders for a collector's pack, at the hefty price of about $120. It's got a soundtrack, a signed illustration, a deck of tarot cards and... wait for it... the actual game. Odds of it making it outside of Japan? Not much, I'd wager. There's a "new" trailer for The 3rd Birthday, which is really just the public release of a behind-closed-doors trailer shown at the Tokyo Game Show. As one should expect, it's got more information about the cast of characters and plot, and more gameplay than we've seen as yet. There's a link to an HD version in the comments at andriasang, and while it takes about ten years to load, it's is amazingly pretty for a PSP game and the music and gargantuan monsters really evoke the feel of the original Parasite Eve.

Back to the 3DS to wrap up, it seems that Hajime Tabata, director of Agito and The 3rd Birthday, thinks that the new Nintendo unit would be a good home for Before Crisis. Since this game has never been available to anyone outside of Japan, perhaps this is one overblown, self-aggrandizing rumor that we could all get behind? The real question is, will anyone look to buy this on a new handheld when the game itself will be almost seven years old by the time the 3DS even launches, let alone when a port could be complete?

Wrapping up with CoN news, I finally got around to automating the process to give people their five-year member awards. That only took like nine months.

Source: andriasang, SiliconEra

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)