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Distant Worlds has just announced a new concert series for the 35th Anniversary of Final Fantasy. Entitled FINAL FANTASY 35th Anniversary Distant Worlds: music from FINAL FANTASY Coral, this series will feature a track list specially curated by Nobuo Uematsu. Little else is known at this stage, including what "Coral" represents, and so far no special guests have been announced. The dates for the series are as follows:

• Tokyo, Japan: 06 Aug 2022
• Tokyo, Japan: 07 Aug 2022
• Hyogo, Japan: 13 Aug 2022
• Hyogo, Japan: 14 Aug 2022
• Chicago, IL: 10 Sep 2022
• Pittsburgh, PA: 20 Sep 2022
• Los Angeles, CA: 24 Sep 2022
• London, UK: 01 Oct 2022
• London, UK: 02 Oct 2022
• Fort Worth, TX: 12 Nov 2022
• Boston, MA: 19 Nov 2022
• Bangkok, Thailand: 17 Dec 2022
• Bangkok, Thailand: 18 Dec 2022
• New York, NY: 07 Jan 2023
• New York, NY: 08 Jan 2023
• Nashville, TN: 25 Jan 2023
• Barcelona, Spain: 03 Feb 2023
• Paris, France: 25 Feb 2023
• Amsterdam, The Netherlands: 03 Mar 2023
• Orlando, FL: 10 Mar 2023
• Orlando, FL: 11 Mar 2023

Source: Distant Worlds Official Site

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker continues to rack up the awards, taking three awards at SXSW this weekend.

The first award was for Excellence in Narrative: awarded to the game with the best storyline and dialogue. The other nominees in that category were:

• Deathloop — Arkane Lyon / Bethesda Softworks
• Kena: Bridge of Spirits — Ember Lab
• Lost in Random — Zoink Games / Electronic Arts
• Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy — Eidos-Montréal / Square Enix

The second award was for Excellence in Original Score. It was Masayoshi Soken's celebratory tweet that alerted this reporter the awards were happening this weekend! Other nominees in this category were:

• The Artful Escape — Beethoven & Dinosaur / Annapurna Interactive
• Kena: Bridge of Spirits — Ember Lab
• The Medium — Bloober Team
• Wytchwood — Alientrap Games / Whitethorn Games

The final award was for Video Game of the Year. SXSW's description for this award states: awarded to the game that exemplifies overall excellence and creates a distinct gaming experience across all platforms and genres. Other nominees in this category were:

• It Takes Two — Hazelight / Electronic Arts
• Psychonauts 2 — Double Fine Productions / Xbox Game Studios
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — Insomniac Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment
• Resident Evil Village — Capcom

Congratulations to the Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker team for the well-deserved awards! For those readers who may be interested in starting their own journeys in Eorzea: the Final Fantasy XIV Free Trial is now active again and lets you play through all of A Realm Reborn and its first expansion, Heavensward.

Source: SXSW Official Site

We're a few days late with this news: Square Enix has launched a music channel on YouTube, featuring over 5,500 songs from its video game collection.

The channel has reached 66.7k subscribers in the past few days. All fifteen main games in the Final Fantasy series are covered, along with other of the company's franchises. You'll find soundtracks for the SaGa, MANA, Chrono, and NieR series as well as other titles.

The channel includes an introductory video, which you can view here:Source: GameRant

Sony's State of Play stream just ended, and we saw some updates and new reveals from Square Enix.

First up was a very brief look at Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. The game is set to release on March 18th, 2022, and a new playable demo drops today.

The next look we saw was for Forspoken, which recently had its release date pushed back to October 11th, 2022. They showed off a lengthy gameplay trailer, which you can see here:Finally, the half-hour long presentation ended with reveals for two new Square Enix games.

The first shown was The Diofield Chronicle, which is described on PlayStation's official YouTube channel as "An all new Tactical RPG [..] introducing the new "Real-Time Tactical Battle". It's due to come out this year. Here's the trailer:The final reveal was Valkyrie Elysium, another new game releasing this year. Take a look at it here:Source: PlayStation YouTube Channel

Square Enix have just launched a new microsite in the run-up to the 35th anniversary of the original Final Fantasy's launch in Japan, which will be on December 18th of this year. It's quite limited in content so far, though they did publish the site for both English-speaking and Japanese audiences. So far, it mainly has a message from Yoshinori Kitase and links to a couple Final Fantasy-adjacent games coming soon, Chocobo GP and Stranger of Paradise.

With nine months left until the actual anniversary date, the site promises more to come so there's a wide variety of things that could show up. Possibly even more Final Fantasy XVI news?

Source: Final Fantasy 35th Anniversary Special Site (English)