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It may come as some surprise that there's a Wii RPG in the works; it might come as further surprise that now that the details have begun to emerge and a bit of gameplay video has surfaced, that it looks a bit promising.

The game is called "Pandora's Tower," and it's an action RPG. Despite having little experience with games like Devil May Cry, I have to say that my very first impression of the snippets of game play remind me of that sort of game. There are some large beasts, some rapid-fire combat, and fairly expansive environments in which to fight.

The storyline begins at the harvest festival of the nation of Elysium, where a young girl performing for the crowd falls stricken as monsters attack the festival. This girl, named Ceres, is rescued by her (considerably older) friend Ende and a merchant named Graiai. However, Ceres has been cursed by the monsters, and Ende must immediately begin some dungeon crawls in an effort to break the curse forever before Ceres is consumed.

The game's out in a little over a month in Japan, but no American or European release has been announced. With the dearth of RPGs for the Wii, though, it would seem like there's a decent chance it will make it over. To see more, check out the writeup and the video from andriasang.


Source: andriasang

While I usually put up a new set of quizzes each month, this month we decided to take a brief break to focus on bringing in new quiztakers. We're going to be working on a minor makeover to make sure that all of you reading this want to get in on the quizzes every month to compete against your fellow CoN members!

With that said, you all can look for the next new set of quizzes at the start of May!

The April 2011 edition of Dengeki Playstation is out in Japan, and a sidebar article in it breaks the news of a new Sony Playstation 3 controller that seems to have remained under the radar until recently. The new controller, says the sidebar, is a joint effort between the two Japanese gaming giants, the first time a developer has worked with Sony directly on a custom controller.

The controller is called the DualShock3 SE (for "Square Enix", not "Special Edition"), and it is expected to list at about 5,500 Yen (currently about $67 US), about the same as a standard DualShock3, shares a lot of physical characteristics with the original PS3 pad. It will, at least for now, be offered only in black, just as the original DualShock3, with the standard general layout and handgrips. After that, though, the pad is departs wildly from the standard controller - the article quotes a Squenix source as saying "we determined that the best way to play games from the modern Final Fantasy series was to streamline the controller so that the most necessary buttons are always front and center." The development team for the new controller realized that most of the action in Final Fantasy games in the last decade results from either pressing the up arrow or tapping X, to either progress through the linear maps or dismiss repetitive dialogue or cutscenes, and as such they made those buttons the focus of the pad.

The team realizes that the new style of the pad is not for everyone, and suggests that gamers choose the pad that works best for them individually. "We know that this isn't what you'll want to use for Gran Turismo [or other games], but we think that our pad will make sense for those who love Final Fantasy games." The controller will be released in Japan concurrently with Final Fantasy Versus XIII; there's no indication yet whether it will come to the West, or if Square Enix are working with Microsoft or even Nintendo on a similar device.

Below is a scan from the issue of Dengeki, as well as a higher-resolution render also released by the magazine.


Source: Dengeki Playstation

This week's tidbits bring with them a wide array of fun stuff. We have a cancelled game, some unlockables confusion, a chart topper, a first look at a game and some Dissidia 012 costume DLCs, and some other Dissidia fun.

First up, we have a Shooter, dubbed Project Dropship that has been canned. Gameplay footage had been leaked, as had some concept art. The game had been scheduled as a top-down PlayStation Network and XBox Live shooter, but it was recently scrapped after development since possibly 2008.

However, as you may see from the links, the art and videos have been taken down by request from Square-Enix. This means unfortunately we will know even less about this game, but on the plus side, perhaps the request may indicate the game may not be as dead as it seems. It does seem unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

Second, we have some news that was bad, but turned good, about The 3rd Birthday. Unlocking Lightning's Costume was at first thought to be harder for North American players. However, it now appears that the balance has shifted and it is in fact easier to unlock it for those of you living in lands of stars and stripes, maple leaves, a flag I keep getting mixed up with Italy's when I don't pay attention to the coat of arms and the shade of green, and a lot of other countries I didn't know were parts of North America until I looked it up on Wikipedia.

[Alternative Mexico reference: being victimised by British car show pundits.]

This costume is a reciprocal Easter Egg for Lightning stealing Aya's threads in Duodecim. Quite why the pair swapped clothes is open to speculation that I sincerely hope does not show up in Fanfic Submissions.

Moving onwards, let's have a quick look at some other Duodecim fun. Some more DLC is on the way: A Kingdom Hearts version of Sephiroth is one of the new costumes, while Laguna gets to relive the horrors of being a movie star with his Knight of the Witch costume. Some new music packs on theme will be released too, an FF VII pack containing three FF VII favourites, including Elec de Chocobo, while the FF VIII pack has three more, adding Liberi Fatali which to be frightfully honest, I'm surprised wasn't already in the Dissidia music library.

Moving onwards into yet more Dissidia fanservice, a Character Model viewer using some sort of heathen iPhone magic I don't understand and fear. This witchcraft allows you to have tiny versions of Lightning and Cloud appear on a card, likely a demonic card, as well as view other characters and composite them into other images. This arcane engine of fear costs ¥600 on the Appstore, or about $7 US/£1200 by next Monday the way the Con-Dem government is running things.

Related to Lightning though, a development I find a little worrying. My Second Sphere co-worker, Kane, just posted this thread less than an hour before these tidbits of an accidental leak from Games Workshop, of all places, that has been quickly suppressed. The meat of the leak that concerned us Warhammer nerds was the new miniatures licensed, but the pressing worry for us here is that a singer called Rebecca Black has been signed by Square-Enix for FF XIII-2's theme song. We can hope that perhaps it's not this Rebecca Black but the odds of there being two singers by the same name are disturbingly slim.

The other revelation, that of a Games Workshop licensed set of miniatures based on FF characters, does sound more fun though. Games Workshop produce a stunning range of 28mm wargaming figures, and these ones would promise to be just as impressive. It's just a shame the actual mini previews were in SE's hands, and not the butterfingers of Games Workshop.

Staying with Final Fantasy though, it would seem the recent Final Fantasy IV Complete Collection has repeated the success of FFIV's various remakes and re-releases and has once again proved every bit as popular as before. The updated PSP release swept up to first place in Media Create's weekly sales chart.

A large part of that success is likely based on two factors: It would seem that the fanbase can't have enough versions of FFIV, and the added bonus of a more portable version of The After Years must have drawn in the punters. It remains to be seen though, if Western games will be as receptive when the game launches April 19th in North America, and April 22nd in Europe.

And lastly, swinging over to another RPG series, we've got a first look at Dragon Quest Heroes Rocket Slime 3DS. This world-journeying, pirate-blasting adventure is out Winter, and Square-Enix are teaming up with the magazine V Jump to promote the game, it seems, so more goodies on the game should be forthcoming.

Source: Silicon Era, Andriasang, Second Sphere

If you have trouble keeping up with Square Enix news, your favorite Final Fantasy website is here to help by making it easier to keep up with everything CoN posts to the news section.

For a couple weeks now, we've been testing our ability to automatically post our news also to Twitter and Facebook every time a CoN staffer - or you, hint, hint - clicks that "Post News" button. After seeing good results, I wanted to make sure that all of our news readers and forum posters at the site knew the feature was there.

So, if you want to be notified in your feed every time we post the latest Square Enix news, publish news about the site, announce a contest, or anything else, it's easy and you have two options: either +Like the CoN Facebook page or follow @cavesofnarshe on Twitter.

Hope to see you there soon!

Whoa, buddy. Square Enix woke up this week - there's buckets of tidbits coming down the pipeline. Again, they tend to be mostly hand-held, but that's just where the company is right now; they're working to get their foot into a market that is more lucrative than console gaming, and I'm pretty sure this one is.

Let's start with the biggest one: we already talked about Final Fantasy VI coming to the Wii Virtual Console in Japan. Next month, it's getting a new partner in crime: Chrono Trigger. Like Final Fantasy VI, it seems a total no-brainer to bring this one to the States soon; however, there's no announcement yet for anyone in the West. I think you probably can hold your breath, though, if you really want to; again, kind of a no-brainer to bring one of the best RPGs of the 16-bit era over and make a bit of cash from it.

There's new info for Final Fantasy Type-0 this week; it appears that Jump and Dengeki Playstation beat Famitsu to the ball. There's a bit of gameplay info and some new screens from Jump, and Dengeki published some battle screenshots and a bit of early description of how the battle system will work. To me, it sounds a bit like a multi-member-party Crisis Core, with the battles resembling the missions of Crisis Core a bit, as they seem to contain a series of battles which end only when you find and defeat the "lead enemy." To explain the difference in the characters, Dengeku also goes a bit into three of the characters' fighting styles: Ace tosses cards a la Setzer for both attack and defense, Nine is a lancer, and Queen is a swordswoman. Famitsu did catch up at the end of the week, with a big blowout of new screens and even more battle, story, and character information than the other two, including some extrapolation on the party setup - while parties will include three members, you will control only one at a time - switching between the three can be done mid-stream, though. Anyway, my favorite part of info from that rollup is that there might actually be a playable Tonberry character. How great would that be?

Final Fantasy III dropped for iOS this week, at the low, low price of $15.99. When you consider that the DS version is still twenty bucks from Amazon, maybe that's not so bad. The reviews on iTunes are really great so far, but really, how much can you trust reviews like that? I will say that the game looks pretty fantastic based on the screens and video I've seen, but I just can't really fathom using my phone that much for a game. The release of III pays dividends for those who want other FF games on their Apple devices, though: Squenix is dropping the prices of their other games until the end of the month to celebrate. For instance, Final Fantasy is down to $3.99, and Song Summoner is $4.99, both the cheapest they've ever been, by far. Something that's not going on sale is the gallery/calendar/clock Dissidia Duodecim app, which rings in at $5.99 and has some pretty pictures and some functionality that is like what is already on your iOS device, just not as useful. Well played, Squenix.

Final Fantasy IV: Complete Collection released in Japan yesterday, too. andriasang brings us all of the launch info for the game, from adverts to related Dissidia Duodecim content to downloadable wallpaper, the second of which is really pretty awesome.

In Square Enix business news, the company announced this week that they launched a new subsidiary on 7 March called Hippos Lab, with an adorable logo to match. This company allegedly will be tasked with creating original content for smartphones - what this really means remains to be seen, but it could be interpreted that either the wash of smartphone remakes is at its end, or that it might just continue while the new company focuses solely on new games and new IPs. Simultaneously, the company said that the announcement regarding what Canadian city would get the new Squenix studio would come in May, but there's still no word on what games the studio might produce.

Source: andriasang, Kotaku, Gamasutra