News

As part of the celebration for the Final Fantasy 25th Anniversary, Square Enix brought in a wide array of artists to create an album celebrating the music of the series up to now. This is not exactly new news, though I believe we missed it in tidbits around the time that it was announced in October. The album was released last week, though, and to promote it a bit more, Square Enix Music posted this medley video to YouTube earlier this week, with samples of a large number of the tracks.

There's a lot of variety on show in this video, and it really makes for some fresh takes on some of the Final Fantasy music that we've heard for many, many years. It's piqued my interest, so I took some time to try to find some English-language shops that sell the double disc; while AmaCoN looked a bit pricey, I found that another of our shop affiliates, Play Asia, has the set for $35.00 including free shipping. If the video makes you want this for Christmas or... New Year's (?), hit that link right away.

Source: Square Enix YouTube, Destructoid

After a painfully long process, CoN is giving to you today, only five years after its release, our coverage for Final Fantasy V Advance (to accompany, of course, improved coverage of the PlayStation release). While it is one of the less-popular games that CoN covers, it remains a quality release even as it approaches its twentieth anniversary, and long ago we realized that our coverage of the game was the weakest of any game covered on the site.

While it did take us far too long to get this content out to you all, we're very proud of the work that we've done, particularly in the massive, Djibriel-penned walkthrough. The walkthrough was fantastic to begin with, with an immense depth, and having it CoN-nified will make it all the better for you too. We've added to that some more of our great CoN features, with all the equipment and monster data you've come to expect, along with our quality miniguides that make the trickiest parts of the game easy to access and easy to understand.

Final Fantasy V is the only game we cover that I have not personally played from start to finish in any of its incarnations. This section is good enough that I now want to. (I probably still won't, but at least I want to!) While I played my usual role of slavedriver, though, this section really came to be based mostly on the hard work of others. They're all listed on the new Final Fantasy V landing page, and will all get their site awards quite soon, but I wanted to take the time to mention a few specifically: Djibriel, for offering us his fine work and being willing to work with us as we adjusted the tone a bit to best represent CoN; Death Penalty, who continued to push me and put way too much work into the section for someone who doesn't even particularly like the game; and EvilEye, who isn't even on the bloody site staff and never has been, but poured dozens of hours into testing simply because he loves CoN.

I hope that you all take a look at this section today and in the days going forward, and that it helps push you toward wanting to play this game, on PSX or GBA (or even SNES), for the first time or for another time. Thanks to you all for visiting CoN and keeping work like this going through your very presence.

Oh, and if the title of this news article confuses you, you need only look several years in the past.

For those of us waiting for a FFV and FFVI DS remake, it appears that we might have to wait for some time. Long time Square Enix producer Shinji Hashimoto, executive producer of almost all Final Fantasy remakes and ports, stated on Twitter that due to "technical issues" Square is undecided at the moment on whether or not to go ahead with them.

The response was an answer to numerous fan questions regarding the release of certain Square video games. Hashimoto's reply to all of them was that they were "at present undecided," and that Final Fantasy V and VI in particular had technical difficulties.

Now, as to what technical difficulties, I can't be certain because the details are vague. It does seem very likely that we will have to wait quite some time for these already long-awaited ports.

Source: AndriaSang Gaming News from Japan

For all those who have complained about our Final Fantasy V data in the past, don't worry, we just finished upgrading a ton of it! And for those of you (roughly 93%) who have never been into that section, well, now you have a reason to go.

We've done a fresh dump of enemy data from the game and input it into our data tables, which freed us up to do a lot of new stuff. For one, we have doubled the details we will give you for each enemy, including various strengths, weaknesses, abilities, and win/steal data. That allowed us to upgrade some other sections too - the magic page now will show you where to buy, win, or steal or learn certain spells, and weapons, armor, and items all crossreference the shop and enemy data tables to pull the same data.

As always, we won't guarantee that some little irritants didn't slip through, but we did a ton of QA work here that should have caught the bulk of it. This project took us several months of starts and stops, and I had a ton of help. Thanks a lot to all of the following:

• Silverlance for generating the data dumps;


• Caesar and Djibriel for analysing, proofreading, and translating the dumps as needed, and checking the input to our tables;


• MogMaster and Karasuman for the help in additional manual data entry after the first batch upload;


• And, finally, Del S for doing more data entry, testing, fact checking, and general raw effort than you can throw a Fire Skill at.