So, E3 started today, and there’s oodles of live blogging going on around the net. This morning, though, Square Enix held a press conference, and of special interest is the fact that Final Fantasy XIII will NOT be a PS3 exclusive.

Yeah, you read that right… FF13 is going multi-platform and will be released on the 360, as well. According to producer Yoshinori Kitase, Square-Enix will first finish the PS3 version of the game for Japan, followed by the overseas localizations, and then will begin development on the 360 version. Interestingly enough, the 360 version may not be released in Japan. Whether or not XIII will make use of XBOX Live in any way is still undecided.

Versus XIII, however, will be remaining exclusive to the PS3.

Info courtesy of Kotaku.

Square Enix released a new trailer today for their Final Fantasy mash-up fighting title, Dissidia: Final Fantasy (coming eventually to a PSP near you). In addition to some new character reveals, the trailer also show 2008 as the release window for the game… at least in Japan. It’s anyone’s guess when it will make it stateside. Check out the trailer at GameTrailers.com

Square Enix has announced that they’ll be having a private party for some of their lucky, lucky Japanese fans in early August. 2400 of them to be exact, drawn randomly from the Japanese version of the Members site. Though I do have an account there, the event will be taking place in Harajuku, so I guess my chances of being invited and being able to go are pretty much slim to none.

But that’s not important… what’s important is that events in Japan that fans are allowed into inevitably mean nifty new goodies making their way onto the internet. And the list of titles that will be showcased is downright droolworthy.

They’re calling the event DKΣ3713 (which is kind of a bizarre acronym, but here’s the breakdown:

Dissidia Final Fantasy
What we know: It’s a fighting game, a la Super Smash Bros. in that it brings together characters from all across Final Fantasy-dom, but differs in that the battle field is fully three-diemsional. Characters can be customized with weapons and equipment and will have individual attack skills available. Dissidia is in development for Sony PSP.

Kingdom Hearts
What we know: Square Enix will be showcasing all three of their Kingdom Hearts titles currently in development (but it looks like KH3 won’t even be making a cameo): Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep (PSP) which is a pequel involving the three characters seen in the KH3 teaser, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (Nintendo DS) which focuses on Roxas’ story prior to KH2, and Kingdom Hearts Coded (Mobile Phone) which takes place following KH2 and involves a virtual Sora created from Jiminy Cricket’s Journal.

Sigma (that’s the Σ for you non-math people) Harmonics
What we know: In developement for the Nintendo DS, Sigma Harmonics is an RPG about a student named Sigma Kurogami whose past in inexplicably rewritten. With the help of his friend, Neon, he must return his life to normal.

The 3rd Birthday
What we know: It’s the third in the Parasite Eve series, though apparently not a sequel, but rather the third appearance of Aya Brea. What little information is available about the game implies that the game is significantly different from Parasite Eve 1 and 2, hence the exclusion of the series name from the title. The game will be for mobile phones.

Final Fantasy 7
What we know: Though there is no FFVII remake for PS3 schedule to debut at the party, we will be seeing Advent Children Complete… the Blu-ray director’s cut version of the recent Final Fantasy VII sequel movie, which boasts several additional scenes.

Final Fantasy 13
What we know: It’s comprised of three games, making up the Fabula Nova Crystallis project. Final Fantasy XII, the main game in the series has had the most attention by far, and we’ve seen more of it’s look and gameplay than the other titles. It centers on a floating city called Cocoon, a futuristic utopia built for humans by a race called the Farsi to protect them from the world below and anyone who has come in contact with it. Final Fantasy Versus XII has a much darker tone, and revolves around the young prince of the kingdom in which the last Crystal on the planet is kept, which is under siege by outsiders. Both are headed for the PS3. Final Fantasy Agito XII, on the other hand, is for mobile phones, and involves a school for mages. It has been describes as an online RPG.

According to Wired, both videos and demos will be available for guests, though there’s no mention of which games will be playable. Check out the Official announcement page if you like… though it won’t be much help to you if you don’t read Japanese.

Damn you Square-Enix. You do this to me every time… I’m busy playing one game, and then you go and release something new, and said game instantly begins collecting dust on my game shelf (in this case, Dead Rising is the poor unfortunate). It happened with Final Fantasy XII, it happened with Crisis Core, and now, of course, it’s happened with My Life as a King.

My Life as a King is available as WiiWare from the Wii Shop Channel for a somewhat pricey 1500 Wii Points (it’s actually the most expensive off all the U.S. WiiWare launch titles), and I’ll be honest… I’m cheap. If it hadn’t had the Final Fantasy moniker, I probably would have passed.

The first thing you might notice when and if you download Square-Enix’s first foray into WiiWare is that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is *gasp* not an RPG. Apparently they can make other kinds of games over there in Sephiroth-ville. No, My Life as a King is, in fact, a civilization simulator in which you are a king and you must rebuild your kingdom.

That’s not to say the standard Final Fantasy gloss hasn’t been put on this game. Even though it is a sim, it still sort of has the feel of an RPG. There is a battle system, even though you yourself don’t do any battling, and there is an engrossing (if somewhat simple for the franchise) plot that is revealed gradually through cutscenes that seem to come up about once a month (game time, obviously) or so.

To be honest, the first few days in your kingdom are a little boring. You spend a fair amount of time talking to Chime, your chancellor, whom you summon to your side by ringing a bell. Chime is in charge of the command menu, and will help you build, boost morale of your citizens, and tell you when it’s time to go to bed. Things are linear, you have almost nothing to work with, no one to talk to, and you’re stuck in tutorial city learning how to do the fun stuff but not really doing much of it.

And then the fun begins. Once you pick up the necessary fundamentals, you have a lot more freedom, and things get a lot more interesting. Instead of just doing what the game dictates, you can begin to commission adventurers, send them out to fight monsters, and build new structures to bring in more people to get more money to hire more adventurers to fight more monsters, and so on and so forth.

Initially, the days are short, cash is low, and buildings are limited (all you can build at first is one kind of very simple house). What really makes this game work for me is the desire to find more stuff. You know there’s stuff out there to unlock and you want it, damn it, so you start sending people out to unlock it.

Half the fun of the game, like many sims, is trying to keep up with the needs of the people. The adventuring system adds a nice touch, because in addition to keeping your adventurers in good spirits, you must also make sure they’re trained well enough to complete the the dungeons you send them to, make weapons and other equipment available to them, and ensure that they have time to rest. Things may start out slow, but they pick up quickly, and soon you have a lot of people who need bakeries, and parks, and sharp, pointy swords.

My Life as a King is also the first (and currently the only) WiiWare title to utilize the Pay to Play feature, which allows you to download additional (but optional) content for the game. There are already a number of options currently available:

1. Dungeon Pack (300 Wii Points) - adds 11 new dungeons to the game

2. Lilty Hut (300 Wii Points) - adds dungeons to unlock houses for Lilties

3. Selkie Den (300 Wii Points) - adds dungeons to unlock houses for Selkies

4. Yuke Shack (300 Wii Points) - adds dungeons to unlock houses for Yukes

5. Triple Race Pack (800 Wii Points) - combines the Lilty Hut, Selkie Den, and Yuke Shack content into one, slightly discounted download.

6. New Royal Outfit (100 Wii Points) - a new costume for the king

7. New Chancelor Outfit (100 Wii Points) - a new costume for Chime

8. Luxurious House (100 Wii Points) - unlocks a new house style that greatly increases income.

9. Sacred Shrines (200 Wii Points) - unlocks Shrines, which temporarily boost your adventures’ stats.

The nice thing about My Life as a King is that you can pick it up and play it for ten or fifteen minutes, or you can sit and play for 3 hours at a time, depending on what kind of mood you happen to be in.

The downsides? Well, for one thing, there’s a lot of repetition. For the most part you’re really just doing the same series of actions over and over to unlock more content and advance further into the game… but then that’s true of just about every sim I’ve ever played (which is probably why I don’t often get into them). For me, though, the story and the adventuring system somewhat make up for the repetitive nature of the game.

On the whole, it’s by no means my favorite Final Fantasy title, but it’s still fun and strangely addictive. I give it an overall 7 out of 10.

So, you may have heard that WiiWare launched yesterday. With it came a brand new Final Fantasy title, which naturally I had to immediately download and play. Well… maybe “immediately” isn’t the right word.

My first issue was with the Wii Shop itself. I could connect, but the connection kept getting dropped right as I was about to add Wii Points to my account so I could buy the game. Now if I were a smarter person, I would have saved myself the headache and Googled the error code before I did anything else. But I’m not. I’m an idiot.

So after attempting six or seven times to buy Wii Points and failing miserably, it (*cough*half an hour later*cough*) finally occurred to me that, gee… maybe my connection keeps getting dropped because my router is having some sort of emotional crisis or whatever it is that gets into those things when they stop working right.

Since yelling at the damned thing never seems to work, I decided to skip that step and try the age-old fix-all of unplugging it and plugging it back in. Well, that didn’t work, either. Now, I should probably, at this point, explain that I’m not a hardware person. If the issue is software-related I can usually figure out where the problem is, but when my hardware starts acting funny, my usual recourse is to format C:\ and cry myself to sleep.

As that solution seemed a little extreme for a router problem, so it was off to the Nintendo support website in the hopes that someone out there had the same problem I did. Handy thing that site. I was right… the problem was with my router. Support told me to try changing the broadcast channel from 1 to 11.

Except, since I’m not a hardware person, I had no idea how to do that. In the end, I decided to do the unthinkable… I referred to the manual. Funny thing is, my Wii always connected to the internet just fine before Comcast took over my service. Bastards. They forced me to read a manual.

Anyway, I guess the whole point of this post is to let you know that around 11:00 last night, I did finally get my hands on the WiiWare title Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (look for the review coming soon) and also if your Wii’s internet connection keeps getting dropped, save yourself some time and try your router on channel 11.

The Nintendo Channel launched yesterday for the Wii, and not surprisingly, one of the videos showed off some of the titles releasing as WiiWare (most likely as U.S. launch titles for next week). Some of them I’ve known about for a while now (because I’m obsessed with Final Fantasy), others have been rumored, and a couple are news to me, so I thought I’d share.

Seen in the teaser video are the following:

Critter Round Up
With gameplay similar to the arcade game Qix, you control a farmer who must build pens for your livestock. Separate the species, avoid running into them, and keep them away from predators. Adventure mode consists of 50 levels, and Marathon mode features infinite levels and multiplayer. There are also minigames.

Defend Your Castle
In Defend Your Castle you must dispatch all enemies before they reach your castle. There are several methods of accomplishing this, including picking them up and throwing them, and attacking them with magic spells and arrows. The game is based on a Flash-based game created by XGen.

Dr. Mario Online RX
Rotate and move multicolored pills to destroy the viruses in the game area. You all know this game. Dr. Mario Online RX also contains a version of Brain Age 2’s Germ Buster mini-game, which uses the pointer function of the Wii Remote to move pills. The game supports co-op play for up to four people, and uses the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection for online competition.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King
From Square-enix, this is a city-building sim in which you create a kingdom from the ground up. By using the power of a great Crystal you can place buildings and attract residents. Use of the Crystal is limited by you Spirit Power, you can be replenished by sending out troops to explore dungeons and the surrounding lands and collect smaller crystals. The game also features additional downloadable content in the form of costumes, buildings, and recruitable races.

LostWinds
LostWinds is a platformer starring a young boy and Wind Elemental named Toku who must save his homeland from the elemental, Balasar. You must control Toku and simultaneously use the Wii Remote to draw paths on-screen that control the direction of the wind. Wind is also used to enhance Toku’s jumps, battle enemies, and solve puzzles.

WiiWare launches on Monday, so if you’ve been putting off buying those extra Wii Points, now might be a good time to do it. U.S. prices aren’t 100% confirmed, but Japanese prices have been in the 500 to 1500 Wii Point range.

I’ll tell you right now, every time I come across one of these interviews you’re going to be hearing about it.

The rumors, possibilities, and outright demands for a Final Fantasy VII remake have been floating around the web for ages now, and Square Enix has never officially come out and said they’re going to do. Oh, they’ve repeatedly said that it’s something they would like to do, that the fanbase would eat it up, and that they would make gobs of money if they did it (ok, to my knowledge, they’ve never actually said that last bit, but we all know they’re thinking it), but they’ve never actually given any sort of proposed timeline for such a project.

And, shockingly, they still haven’t. If you missed the sarcasm there, I’ll try to make it more blatant in the future.

But, on the bright side, they’d still love to do it. Someday. Maybe.

Courtesy of Kotaku, Yoshinori Kitase, director of the original FFVII had this to say:

Personally, I’m not going to argue with that. FFXIII is comprised of three separate games, after all, and a project that big certainly isn’t going to get put on hold or even slightly delayed for a mere remake. And, as I recall, some of the original FFVII team are also working on the new Kingdom Hearts projects, another major franchise for Square-Enix.

Okey dokey, so an FFVII remake will have to wait until they’re done with FFXIII. But what’s this? Kitase also added this little gem:

So… if you REALLY wanted to do it, you’d do it? Does that mean you don’t really want to do it? That last “definitely expect the probability at some point” absolutely kills me. A simple yes or no would be far less aggravating than “sure, definitely, maybe, if we feel like it, someday”. This only reaffirms my belief that Square-Enix employees get some sort of sick, twisted joy out of tormenting those of us who want to see this remake happen.

I hate you Square-Enix. I hate you, and yet I love you.

It took me longer than I thought it would, but I finally made it through Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. And I’m very happy to report that it managed to live up to my expectations, unlike a certain other entry in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII.

The game itself is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII, chronicling the events during the five years that lead up to the original story. Crisis Core follows Zack, Soldier 1st class, and Cloud’s friend and mentor. Spoilers follow, so if you’re still in the middle of the game, or haven’t started it yet and don’t want to hear them, stop reading now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like Square Enix is bringing its Members website stateside. For those unaware of how good people in Japan have it when it comes to video games, Square Enix runs a nifty little members section on their S-E Japan site, which plays host to all sorts of exclusives that their obsessive consumers are interested in (usually in the vein of new game trailers and media downloads, but they’ve also got a flash-based “virtual world” set up).

Now, the Square Enix North America site includes a Members section due to open on March 24 (the day before the release of Crisis Core: FFVII… coincidence?). Pre-registrations are already open. The splash page promises “exclusive content such as interview, blogs, giveaways, and more”. I’m guessing that we’re not getting anything near as interesting as what the Japanese site has, but if you’re a fellow Final Fantasy fan, you might want to take a look.

After all, everyone like giveaways. ^_^

I don’t really dig portables. The last handhelds I owned were the original Nintendo GameBoy, (and to be honest, it didn’t get a whole lot of use after they came out with the Super GameBoy adapter for the SNES) and the Sega GameGear (picked up second-hand at a garage sale along with a handful of games, the only one of which that was any good being the Sonic title).

I’m very much a console girl, and probably always will be. I don’t like the tiny screens on handhelds. I don’t like the way the buttons are arranged to accommodate the tiny screens. And did I mention that I don’t like the tiny screens? Itsy, bitsy, teeny, tiny screens.

That said, yesterday, I went out and dropped around $200 on a PSP for the sole purpose of playing one title.

Well, actually two titles, but Final Fantasy: Dissidia hasn’t got a release date yet, and probably won’t make it to the U.S until sometime in 2010 at the earliest, anyway.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Oh sweet mother of Cloud, am I ever a Final Fantasy fangirl. FFVII was the title that really got me hooked on the series (and it’s still my favorite - haters can die in a fire.), so I was very enthusiastic about the release of Advent Children a while back, along with Dirge of Cerberus: FFVII… both direct sequels to the original game.

Advent Children is good, but clearly intended for the rabidly FFVII-obsessed… like me. Dirge of Cerberus is really only enjoyable if you’re A) a fan of Vincent Valentine, and B) not big into shooters. And as much as I love Vinnie, let’s face it - shooters just aren’t Square Enix’s thing, and it definitely showed in DoC.

With Crisis Core, however, I’m hoping for something special. The game has been getting consistently excellent reviews in Japan, and even U.S. gaming sites that have been given a sneak peek have been forced to admit that it doesn’t completely suck. That leaves us with the question… is this one going to live up the the hype when it hits the U.S. on March 25? I sincerely hope it at least comes close. It would be nice if the whoring out of the FFVII franchise amounted to something other than eye candy.

By the way… if anyone has any PSP game recommendations (so that I don’t feel like a total nerd for buying this damn thing for one title) please use the comment form below.