Welcome to the Caves of Narshe

As we previously announced back in May, Final Fantasy XI is expanding its free trial. Well, that day has finally arrived, and the expanded trial is now live!

There's been two major changes:

• Unlimited Playtime - the former free trial limited the player to just 14 Earth days of play. Now, the trial is unlimited in time - players can play to their heart's content and undertake ALL the free trial has to offer, much like its Final Fantasy XIV counterpart.
• Increased Level Cap - the former free trial level cap was level 50. Players will now be able to level to 75, which was the original level cap of the game.

The free trial does come with multiple limitations, which are detailed on the Square Enix Store page for the free trial. Most of these limitations are to prevent bad actors from using free trial accounts to participate in Real Money Trade (RMT) acitivites, which is firmly against the game's Terms of Service.

You may be wondering what you DO get access to, though! A partial list of activities you can undertake on the Free Trial has been posted in our forums.

In celebration of the expanded Free Trial, there is a Moogle Support Campaign happening for all players: upon login, players will receive a Mog Pell (Red), Mog Pell (Ochre), and a Trust Tome. 

The Mog Pells can be traded for a variety of useful items! For the Red Mog Pell, the official site recommends the Trizek Ring though your newswriter does NOT recommend that for Free Trial players, as such players cannot get Capacity Points on the trial. Instead, get one of Trust Ciphers listed, which will let you use Trust Magic to have NPCs fight alongside you in battle. Kupofried will hang out in your party, granting an experience bonus but does NOT fight; if you're looking for a Trust that is a damage dealer, I'd recommend Lion who has good attack speed, or Zeid who will Stun the enemy.

For the Ochre Mog Pell, it's recommended that you choose Shantotto II's Cipher. Shantotto II is a tremendously powerful Black Mage and is a boon to any party. Note that there are several different Shantotto ciphers, so do make sure you choose the correct one. If you already have Shantotto II, Amchuchu (a Rune Fencer tank) or King (a Red Mage who will buff the party) are good choices.

If you're joining the game for the first time, you'll find the Install Guide to be very helpful. BG-Wiki also has several other guides geared to the newer player.

Welcome to Vana'diel! We'll leave the light on for you.

It’s been a year today since Square Enix released the fantastic Ivalice Chronicles remake for Final Fantasy Tactics, and I know a lot of you out there have played it because I’ve seen the traffic data for our Tactics coverage over that time.

But, there are still so many people out there who haven’t picked up this phenomenal game yet, so we want to spur you along to purchase and play by releasing our new coverage, with a completely new standalone version to choose from in the FFT section of Caves of Narshe. If this is your first time visiting that section, you will see that we default you right into that game version, but if you’ve been through it before all you need to do is use our version switcher.

We built the new data out using our own playthroughs and quite a lot of in-house data mining to make sure we’re getting things just right. It’s got all of the detail of our old coverage and then some. We were even able to make some additions to the coverage for older versions along the way! So, as Ivalice Chronicles turns one, please enjoy our new content starting at day zero and beyond, and thanks as always for visiting us and trusting us to help you play our classic games.

Sony’s State of Play for September just wrapped, and as our beloved reader should probably fully expect, it featured among its games (and movie) both of the new Final Fantasy games coming up.

Final Fantasy Resonance appeared early in the presentation; the bulk of the content was compiled from prior trailers, but at the end, Square Enix showed the first bits of Sephiroth in cutscene and as an opponent, and also announced that the demo is available starting today in advance of the October release. At the time of writing, I don’t see the demo online but I’m also not in front of my consoles so it may already be there.

Final Fantasy VII Revelation got ten full minutes of video and gameplay today, which is a bit of a surprise to me given that Tokyo Game Show is two weeks away and I’d assumed the next big reveal would happen there. In the lead-in, Sid Shuman of Sony called this the “release trailer,” which honestly doesn’t sound accurate based on the release timeline and the content of the trailer, but we will see. I’ll warn you here that if you’re not caught up on the series yet, some of this post is going to feel spoilery from here on out. Some of the highlights:

• The absolute briefest glimpse of Zack and Aerith together outside Aerith’s house, with Aerith’s face registering shock. The look was so brief that it’s impossible to work out the context, but based on Rebirth, I would say there’s probably a pretty reasonable guess.
• The return of Piko and his ability to fight; it looks like Piko gets a glow-up either by default or through customization, and the party’s chocobos are able to participate with mounted combat now.
• The FITS system information seemed a little confusing based on what had been presented before; I was under the impression that FITS would have some variation per-character, but today’s video implied heavily that there were only four available and all characters would be choosing from the same ones. Cid was shown using the Knight class, with its tanking and party-protection attributes familiar from other Final Fantasy games, and Vincent was shown as a Summoner, with the ability to unlock synergy abilities with the summoned beast. The other two are Warrior, and Black Mage, which we briefly saw at Summer Game Fest.
• We also got a few minutes of gameplay within Wutai, featuring Yuffie grappling around the capital and taking cute cat photos. Rocket Town was explicitly mentioned just after this, but not shown.
• The gameplay stopped at Gongaga to be introduced to a quest for Cissnei, specifically to assist with protecting the Gongaga Youth Coalition and rid the area of Malboros. The main point in showing the quest was to remind us that FF7 Compilation characters would be showing up around Revelation, and also to reveal that sidequests will play out differently depending on who you choose to lead the quest. I assume that they’ve done this to increase replayability by making subsequent runs work differently.
• The last big gameplay reveal was a first live look at Queen’s Blood. An all-new questline will be part of Revelation, with Red XIII as the protagonist; a short look at gameplay against Regina was shown, with some sort of special card played during the draw, but it wasn’t exactly clear how it changed the game from Rebirth.

A release date of April 8, 2027 was announced at the end of the trailer, which is certainly later than I was hoping; I’d legitimately hoped February for synergy with Rebirth, but Remake itself launched in April as well. Hamaguchi said (in the subtitles) that preorders for a “Trilogy Edition” would open today, but the standalone third game wasn’t specifically mentioned. Seems like those preorders should be coming very soon, though, if not today with the full bundle.

In the State of Play Japan that started immediately after the English SoP ended, Squenix also showed a little bit of gameplay and cutscenes from the new Dragon Quest Monsters game that releases on December 3. I won’t embed that video here because this post is already massive, but the game looks very much exactly what you would expect from a new DQM game.

Once again, CoN has popped up just a little bit late to the party but with full CoN verve; we’ve just launched full coverage for the Pixel Remaster versions of all four of the pixelly games we host. So, if you’re a player here for the original Final Fantasy, or the three games that originated in the 16-bit era (Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI if you’re a bit behind), those games are now fully here for you.

If you’re visiting the site for the first time today, all of that game coverage will default to the Pixel Remaster version for you, as we know that first-time players are likely coming to us via those games; if you’re a long-time CoN visitor, all you need to do is switch your version to Pixel Remaster for each game as you need it.

While we were in there, of course, we found and fixed a number of bugs that we found along the way, so no matter what release you’re playing, you’re going to have a better experience with us now. Will we have fixed more bugs than we created? Well, we certainly hope so, but if you find that’s not the case, please reach out on socials, Discord, or the forums as always. Thanks so much for your continued support of Caves of Narshe and please share our new content out to all your friends and networks.

If you're reading this, you probably missed our watchalong in Discord, but you're ready to see the new trailer. Despite Hamaguchi being on stage to present the new video, the overall showing was pretty brief today; it was another quick-cut video showing a lot of things that we expected to see at some point or knew we would see in the near future, but it was welcome all the same. In brief, it was a Weapon-heavy trailer, leading with Rufus discussing the "many threats" to the world, including both Meteor and the Weapons. Ruby, Emerald, and Ultima weapons all got shown with fancy title cards just after. The summon Typhon got a first look, as well as a brief look at Wutai and a couple brief scenes from the Gelnika, proving that the underwater sequence will not be cut from the Remake series. A little bit of gameplay was interspersed among the other clips; from first glance it seemed to be missing the UI that was shown in the prior trailer, but it did show some new chocobo riding and Tifa and Cloud leveraging FITS. I'm posting this before watching again, but unfortunately, I don't think we got anything absolutely brand-new beyond what I've already called out. Tell me I'm wrong wherever you like.

• The Warrior of Light, Final Fantasy I
• Terra, Final Fantasy VI
• Cloud, Final Fantasy VII
• Zidane, Final Fantasy IX
• Shantotto, Final Fantasy XI
• Y'shtola, Final Fantasy XIV