News

In what looks to be a record for us at the Caves of Narshe for the most fanfics up in one week, we have another fanfic up in the Final Fantasy VI section. It's called But... I Don't Have the Answer, and is written by forum member Djibriel.

This fanfiction takes place after the end of the game, but isn't your typical after-death fanfic. It focuses on Terra for the latter part, and is a very interesting look at what humanity is dangerously close to ending up as.

Our FF6 Fanfiction section has yet again grown, with a new addition called The Essence of Mimicry.

This gem is by forum member Mr Thou, and is about Daryl and her encounter with the being that is Gogo. It's an excellent fanfic with a great ending to it.

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.

Courtesy our friends at RPGamer:

Square-Enix has announced a prequel to their blockbuster hit, Final Fantasy VII, named Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII. Unlike Advent Children, which is a movie, this is an actual game with battles and action and everything you'd expect from an RPG. What you wouldn't expect is the platform of the game -- Square-Enix has decided that the cell phone market is good enough to release the game there. This raises questions about the ability to bring Before Crisis to the United States, because as anyone who has been to Japan can attest, the cell phone technology in Japan is much more advanced than what is available stateside.

Personally, I think that it's a good idea for Squenix to do the prequel, because it will sell. I think it's a horrible idea to release the game on cellphones. I don't know if their plan is to goad people into buying their cellphone technology or what, but I certainly wouldn't buy a phone just to play a game. This should be a big thing to discuss -- please do it here!

Recently, there was a concert of Final Fantasy music performed in LA, for the E3 convention. According to the article by Gamespot.com , it was a smashing success, and even had a surprise perfomance of One Winged Angel, from FFVII

Among the compositions played, there was:

* Terra's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
* Theme of Love (Final Fantasy IV)
* Dear Friends (Final Fantasy V)
* Aeris's Theme (Final Fantasy VII)
* Not Alone (Final Fantasy IX)
* New Melody From Final Fantasy VII Advent Children
* Final Fantasy (Theme)

Apparently, there were also many video cameras in the audience, so there is a chance that the taped version will be released to the public (or illegally to the internet) sometime in the future.

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I'm sure there are plenty of Final Fantasy fans that wish they could have been at this concert, it sounds like it was a wonderful evening. The article does say that there may be more concerts like this in the future, so keep your ear to the ground if you're interested!

There is new a FFVII: Advent Children magazine scan floating about the internet. Newsworthy is that it appears to feature the first images of Tifa, Marlene, and the Turks. There are also pictures of Vincent, Cloud, and the Sephiroth clones as well.

Don't mind the goofy pirate. He is just Jump magazine's mascot.

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I think the character shots like great. Tifa's proportions seem to be a little more realistic now. The only real gripe I have with the scan is something that Elena99 pointed out in CoNchat. Cloud and Sephiroth's eyes appear to missing their glow.

In order to help maintain the high quality of Final Fantasy games, Square Enix has moved forward the release dates for the next installation of the series. Originally to come out in Japan this summer, it will be pushed back a few months.

The game should arrive on American shores sometime between this winter and next spring.

Full article: Gamespot.com

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I'm a little disappointed to hear this, but the delay isn't by that much. The game will still be coming in due time, and if they want time to get quality, that sounds like a fair deal.

On the 1st of May, RPGOne translations released the first version of their translation patch for the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VI.

If you ever saw Sky Render's project named "End of Fantasy", this is where it ended up. It's a complete retranslation from scratch, foresaking Ted Woolsey's FF3US efforts. The readme claims that the translation is primarily focused on accuracy, with readability second, and that it tries to keep some name consistency with the more recent official Final Fantasy translations where they are sufficiently close to the original Japanese.

Bear in mind that translation is a somewhat subjective issue, and that there's no 100% right or wrong way to translate something between languages. Any comments on this forum from players of this version insisting that they have played a "DIRECT translation" so that their interpretation of an event is bound to be absolutely correct will be met with severe beatings about the face. That said, I'd recommend trying it out to anyone who can do so, as it probably is indeed more faithful to the original game than the official translations (which had to pass through Nintendo's still overzealous censors at the time).

Note that you need a Japanese Final Fantasy VI ROM to apply the patch, and that it can't be combined with modifications for FF3us, such as i90east's expert versions. The download does include an optional patch to prevent Vanish/Doom from working, for anyone who wants a little extra challenge.

Interested? Head over to RPGOne's Final Fantasy VI download page and grab a copy. I encourage you to check out the readme first of all, if only for known issues and patching instructions (though the procedure should be familiar if you've used IPS patches in the past). Finally, please read lead programmer ChrisRPG's message and donate to him if you appreciate his work and have some cash to spare.

On the heels of Elena99's recent news update concerning new FFXII screenshots, Square Enix has released another trailer for the title. This one is a bit longer than the previous one, lasting a lengthy 7-plus minutes.

The good folks at Games_Are_Fun are hosting the video. Pay their site a visit and check out the video.

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I didn't watch the entire video (short attention span++), but the parts that I did see looked great. There seemed to be FMV footage. I'm starting to look forward to the title. The video is quite grainy if the size is increased as the video only weighs in around 15 MBs.

As the release date approaches, we're getting more and more news on the next non-online FF game; FFXII. Courtesy of RPGamer , here are Eight New Screenshots of various scenes, mostly two of the characters, and One New Artwork of the character Pannero.

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I like how the game is looking so far. Although one of those characters still looks like Tidus, the others look interesting. The style of graphics doesn't seem to be too much of a leap from FFX and FFX-2, and it looks like the technology is about the same.