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Bright and early this morning in the West, Konami dropped an announcement trailer for a remaster of the first two games in the Suikoden series. Originally released in the mid and late 1990s for the first PlayStation, the new remastered versions were announced with a vague "2023" release date. The two games will drop as a single bundle for PlayStation 4, XBox One, Switch, and Steam, but pricing information has yet to be released. At the very least, it should be considerably less than it would cost you to get an original copy of Suikoden II in this day and age! Check out the lovely visuals below.

First released in March for Switch, tactical JRPG and Final Fantasy Tactics spiritual successor Triangle Strategy was announced on Tuesday for a Steam release next month. It's currently 10% off for preorders on the Steam store, with three versions available for purchase - standard, digital deluxe, and digital deluxe plus a copy of Various Daylife. The digital deluxe version includes a short digital version of the official art book, the hardcopy of which I recently acquired myself but haven't had time to open and share at all yet.

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing any demo version listed on Steam just yet. I have to admit that until I was able to play the first three chapters in the Switch demo, I hadn't been fully sold on the game, so I wish that it would be available to PC players as well to try out. As it stands, though, I personally think this is the best game Square Enix have released in years, and I'm personally on my fifth playthrough of it currently. So all in all, I'm thrilled that it's likely to find a larger audience with this upcoming PC release.

Source: Triangle Strategy on Steam

Octopath Traveler II was just announced for Nintendo Switch at today's Nintendo Direct stream, with a release date of February 24, 2023. The game takes place in a realm called "Celestia" (pronounced more like "Sillestia?"), with the setting appearing to be more of an industrial revolution or steampunk versus the medieval-era Orsterra. It's not yet clear if the two games appear in different regions of the same world, but the more "modern" setting looks pretty fantastic in the HD2D engine. Obviously, the characters will be all-new as well, with a new set of eight intertwining stories that change based upon playing during day or night in the world. The new characters include a warrior, a dancer, a merchant, a scholar, a thief, a cleric, a hunter, and an apothecary.

Theatrhythm is now coming to Switch as well, with a boatload of new content. Called "Final Bar Line," the new game will come with 385 songs by default, categorized by game so that players can roll through an entire game more or less in storyline sequence. It will feature two-player local co-op, and up to four players online. It's not clear if the online play will be co-op or team-based, or fully competitive - the trailer in Direct called the online play "Battle."

The DLC for the new game will include songs from other Squenix games, with SaGa, Nier, Octopath, and Live A Live announced already. The stream explained that the DLC will offer up to 90 more songs. Additionally, preorders for the Season Pass will include a further 27 songs, though the details on what songs would be included in that set were thin; I think I caught that "Melodies of Life" would be one of them, but all that information came pretty thick and fast.

Among other new-ish games from Square Enix was an RPG called "Various Daylife" that is releasing later today. It was released for Apple Arcade a few years ago, but I honestly recall nothing about it. It looks pretty much like a mobile-first JRPG, and from what I'm reading quickly online about the original release, it plays like one too.

There were a few other bits of Squenix content in the Direct today, but honestly, nothing really unexpected or groundbreaking. You can see the whole Direct here now: