News

We now have opened the Fanart Hall of Fame! Your votes on all of our hundred-plus fanart images are now tabulated for the purposes of showing which pieces are the best on the site. Enjoy!

GamesAreFun.com reports that Enix has purchased Squaresoft, and that Square & Enix have merged to form a new company called ''Square Enix,'' headed by Square President Yoichi Wada.

To any RPG fan, this is GIGANTIC news. Square and Enix are the two biggest RPG developers in the world today, and have been in competition with each other for years, mainly because of Square's ''Final Fantasy'' series and Enix's ''Dragon Quest'' series.

The reason for this huge merger? Square and Enix are merging to cut down development costs, which have become higher in the industry recently.

Enix will primarily be the "controller group" of the merger, even though they are the smaller company. Square shareholders will receive 0.81 a share, since it is a larger company than Enix.

This merger will help out both companies, as Square has been suffering some huge losses since releasing the Final Fantasy motion picture, and Enix has never really been big in America. Thus, this merger will help to soothe Square's profit losses and help establish Enix in the States.

Once again, Square Enix will be presided over by Yoichi Wada of Squaresoft, and the chairman of the company will be Enix's representative director chairman, Yasuhiro Fukushima. The merger is set to take place on April 1st, 2003, the fisrt day of the new fiscal year.

Source: GamesAreFun.com

We've resolved the setup issues with the CoNStore affiliation with GKWorld. Visitors of the CoN can now buy anime, games, soundtracks, posters, keychains, and a lot more online and a portion of the proceeds will come back to CoN to support the site through server costs, contests, and other opportunities.

The CoNStore is one of the keys to this site's growth. So, next time you want that anime DVD or a guidebook for the newest FF game, please consider ordering it through CoNStore. You'll get what you want AND help your favorite site.

Links:
CoNStore
Direct Link to CoNStore with GKWorld

Imagine my surprise when I arrived here this morning, from my cushiony chair at work. I deftly avoided all work-related emails and wandered in here to see what I'd missed last night, and what do I see? Well, the new forums have hit 5000 posts.

I don't have any benchmarks to tell you exactly how long it took the old forums to reach this level, but I can be pretty sure that it didn't happen in four and a half months the way it did here.

Thanks a lot to all the forum regulars who like being here so much, and a special thanks to Spoony Bard, whose post in the Cowboy Bebop Movie thread hit the 5K mark this morning.

The first online game for the Gamecube, Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II was released on Oct. 30th. According to the review here:

http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/reviews/0,10867,2896605,00.html

It does have a few drawbacks, such as a lack of keyboard at the moment in GameCube to communicate with players while online. The reviewer also states that the offline mode is a bit lacking on the storyline side.

However the game does boast interesting new character types, such as a metalic woman who can't use magic, but is immune to poison. There are also changes in other character systems, with Rangers and Hunters among others.

The reviewer gives the overall score of 7.8, rating the game as Medium.

FFX, the newest Final Fantasy to hit the American and European shores, will eventually have an album out. It's a Vocal album, as is mentioned in RPGamer:

http://www.rpgamer.com/news/Q4-2002/110902a.html

Apparently this is not your ordinary Final Fantasy soundtrack; it has the voice actors from FFX acting out scenes that were not in the actual game itself. Possible connections to FFX-2 as well. Could this be a form of advertisement to make sure FF fans are hyped for FFX-2?

Release dates in Japan are set for Dec. 16th, no word yet on the rest of the world.

You probably noticed that this month's FF4 quiz was AWOL. Climmy was being a bit of a reticent bugger about releasing it, but it's been resolved. You can take the quiz now. Sorry for the delay!