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As mentioned in CoN news earlier, Square-Enix's new partnership with Marvel is confirmed and will clearly be this huge, big-budgeted Juggernaut™ with multiple collaborative releases expected over the next several years. Marvel's stories and characters in a Square-Enix graphics engine? The possibilities are endless! What's not to love?

Well for one, this could potentially be responsible for a possible setback in the schedules of one or several big titles Square-Enix slated to release over the coming years. FF7 is already rumored to be pushed back, possibly into 2018. According to express.co.uk (source below), game director Tetsuya Nomura indicated that they have a full schedule for the year including a priority on Kingdom Hearts 3 over all else, and that the FF7 Remake delay is highly likely. While they did not explicitly state that the Marvel collaboration had any connection, more details (and hopefully the release date!) should be coming when the director attends the Monaco Anime Game International Conference (MAGIC) on February 18th.

If true, does this make you feel any less thrilled about the FF7 Remake? We know what happens when this company begins to delay games...!

Source: express.co.uk

And soon! On February 6, the game released in 2015 in Japan and 2016 elsewhere will be released on Steam. Mobius is a Final Fantasy game that, unlike most mobile titles from Square Enix, was developed for higher-end systems using Unity, which should make it a more interesting visual experience on desktops; this version of the game was released in Japan late last year, so one would assume that it will be a relatively trouble-free version for gamers to play. The game's director, Naoki Hamaguchi, told the English Square Enix blog that the game will support resolutions up to 4K and that many players will be able to expect framerates of 60 to 120 FPS, which would certainly be a departure from some PC games the company has released in the past.

Though the release over here is only a week away, the game does not appear available for pre-order in the Steam store currently, so it's not possible to confirm pricing at this time.

The release is timed for a global event in-game. Starting the next day, February 7, a tie-in to the Final Fantasy VII Remake will begin that will feature Cloud arriving in Mobius' world, Palamecia, to fight alongside the game's protagonist Wol in a yet-unannounced scenario. Hamaguchi explained that the assets used to build Cloud and any other Final Fantasy VII-related assets used in Mobius were drawn straight from the assets built for Final Fantasy VII Remake, so Mobius will be the first opportunity for most players to see any live glimpse of what could be coming in Final Fantasy VII's future.

Source: Siliconera, Square Enix Blog

Seriously, is Monopoly not a game that makes it easy to want to avoid your fellow players after you finish? And I know, we're miles behind on catching up with E3 news from Square Enix, but this little tidbit made me smile so I had to share it immediately.

Coming April 14, 2017, Final Fantasy VII will join the hundreds of different varieties of Monopoly games with a fully licensed version sporting a fully-themed game. There's no news yet regarding what characters will serve as tokens, what properties you can fight over, or what on earth Community Chest might be called, though it appears that Midgar will be the setting for the whole game and that Mako Reactors will be involved - almost surely as the Water Works/Electric Company utilities, or possibly as the railroads.

I'll admit to buying a special-edition Monopoly like this in the past, specifically for Futurama. However, at a list price of $49.99, I'm not seeing this show up on my shelf any time in the near future. You?

Source: Siliconera

In an interview with GameInformer debuting their May 2015 cover feature on Final Fantasy XV, Yoshinori Kitase spoke also about the methodology of releasing Final Fantasy VII Remake as an episodic game.

Naturally, some fans are not pleased about the news of the game being episodic, assuming that it will make the game less playable, or cost more, or something else. Those concerns could still be valid, of course; we won't know for quite a long time. What we do know now thanks to Kitase's interview is that the game will be split into an unknown number of parts, but that each will be "full-scale." He also compared the methodology of splitting the story to what was done with Final Fantasy XIII, in which each chapter told a part of the story from a different angle, and that each episode of VII Remake "should be on par with the scale of one Final Fantasy XIII game."

Of course, that does raise some questions, as in my opinion, all three games in the XIII series have fairly different lengths. Personally, I have a hundred hours in XIII, but I have 100% of achievements in 13-2 in under 60. I did about 45 in my first playthrough of Lightning Returns. If I were to look back far enough, I'd guess I topped out at about 90 for all of Final Fantasy VII nearly 20 years ago. What does this mean for Final Fantasy VII Remake? Well, about as much concretely as anything Kitase said thus far!

Source: TechRadar

The Final Fantasy VII Remake broke the internet on Saturday, as well as blew through a large number of my monthly allotment of texts on my phone. Because of the highly-predictable hype, Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura did a fast-follow interview with Dengeki Online and Famitsu to discuss all of the things that have been warmly- and not-so-warmly-acknowledged by fans.

Here are some highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view):

• The title will in fact contain the word "Remake." Because nobody would know otherwise, right?
• Dev is being managed in-house but with some actual development work being done by third parties.
• All of the character models are new.
• The most recent video is virtually all in-engine.
• You can control multiple party members in battle, or just one, with up to three party members available just as in the original game.
• The battles do have an ATB gauge, but it's not like in the original game. How exactly it differs is not clear, but it appears that it is still tied to Limit Breaks.
• You can still put Cloud in a dress.
• There will be new locations to explore, possibly incorporating some areas fleshed out in Compilation games.
• Yes, the remake will be episodic.

That last point seems to be causing a lot of contention in the community, but for my money, I don't see a reason to not give it a wait and see. Given the expectations around this game, it seems to me that doing it episodically will give the developers at least a chance to maximize the quality of the game, and in theory it will give us as gamers a chance to bail on it with a lower cost if for some reason it's truly awful.

This seems like a good time to remind everyone of the podcast we did on these and other subjects around the remake, right?

Source: Gematsu

Sony's PlayStation Experience Keynote presentation was today and didn't disappoint, revealing gameplay footage of Square-Enix's upcoming remake of Final Fantasy VII for the first time. The trailer focuses on the early game in Midgar, revealing in-game footage of Cloud, Barret, Biggs, Jessie, and Wedge through cinematics.

As the trailer continues, though, there is footage of how the battle system is likely to work. It appears to be more of an action-oriented combat system where the player controls one of the party members at a time, leaving the AI to control the others. Very interestingly, the player was shown controlling Barret in battle instead of leaving only Cloud as an option. Rather than a full menu system, there is now a menu where the player chooses what action they're currently taking. "Summon" and "Magic" were selections, though they went tantalizingly unused. Cloud's "Braver" and Barret's "Big Shot" limits seemed to be used, as well as an unknown dash attack. The battle area appeared very large but it was uncertain whether the player enters a separate area for battle or if combat takes place in the same environment where the player walks around and interacts with the environment.

The footage looked incredibly fun, if somewhat unpolished. The voices didn't match up with the mouths of the characters, which is probably just a factor of getting a trailer out before doing the final localization, acting, or voice matching. But we've finally got some actual game footage of a game some of us have been anticipating for decades, and if it's an accurate representation of what we'll get, we may actually have our long-awaited dreams come true.



Source: Kotaku, YouTube