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An embargo on media previews of Final Fantasy XVI was lifted today, leading to a deluge of new info about the game coming this summer. Gematsu, for their part, released a number of new videos from their time playing the game, over forty minutes' worth split over five distinct videos on YouTube. They are mostly centered around the same portion of the game, it would appear, to avoid being too spoilery, but those who want to know absolutely nothing about the game should probably avoid watching too terribly much. I'm not including videos in this post for that reason, too.

Without going too terribly much into those spoilers myself, I can say that the videos show off a lot of combat in various modes, including solo and party combat in both normal encounters, boss encounters, and an Eikon battle. The boss-level encounters showed off a number of quick-time events within battle, certainly more than I expected. Personally, I felt vibes of both Final Fantasy XIII and XV in the combat sequences.

There are some pieces that show where the devs are working towards that M-rating with the ESRB, as well; I caught a bit more bloody violence than we're used to in a Final Fantasy game during the Eikon battle, and I'm pretty sure I caught an f-bomb in one of the boss battles, though I admit I watched the videos at 1.5x speed due to a general lack of time this morning.

Gematsu also published a transcript of a roundtable with the executive team for Final Fantasy XVI, conducted earlier in February in conjunction with RPG Fan and Den of Geek. The interview touches a lot on bringing the "constant" elements of a Final Fantasy game into this new version that steps further into the action genre than any Final Fantasy before it. The entire interview is quite long and covers a number of other topics, too, including the design of boss and Eikon battles to mash-up genres and some questions about how the game looks pretty grimdark overall so far.

The media tour continues, too - Square Enix announced today that there will be another panel discussion about XVI at PAX East at the end of March (there will be a panel for XIV there, too). Final Fantasy XVI is still scheduled for a June 2023 release.

Source: Gematsu, Square Enix on Facebook

I did a quick search of the site to see if we'd covered this yet, and I haven't seen anyone mention it. It looks like this series started in Europe and Asia and I missed hearing about it then, but now there are 22 dates for this new Piano Concert series already announced for the Western Hemisphere:

• San Francisco, March 3
• Los Angeles, March 4
• Las Vegas, March 5
• Phoenix, March 6
• Dallas, March 8
• Houston, March 9
• Miami, March 11
• Tampa, March 12
• Atlanta, March 13
• Washington, D.C., March 14
• Philadelphia, March 15
• New York, March 17
• Boston, March 18
• Montreal, March 19
• Toronto, March 20
• Detroit, March 21
• Chicago, March 22
• Cincinatti, March 24
• Kansas City, March 25
• Minneapolis, March 26
• Denver, March 27
• Sao Paulo, Brazil, March 30/31

As is my personal luck, no shows within a few hundred miles of me but I will miss one of the shows by only two days with some travel I already had planned.

Tickets for all shows are already on sale; here's a trailer for the concert series that the promoter published recently as well.

Source: Crystalline Resonance Site

The Game Awards were last Thursday, and Final Fantasy fans were treated to a nice surprise: Naoki Yoshida, producer of Final Fantasy XVI made an appearance to announce the newest trailer and the game's release date.

The game is being released on June 22nd, 2023, and pre-orders are now open! You can pre-order here: Official Site Pre-order. There's a drop-down on that page that lets you select your region.

The Standard Edition costs $69.99 in the United States, while the collector's edition is $349.99. The latter comes with various goodies, including a Premium Statue - Phoenix vs Ifrit, Metal Eikon Pin Collection, Special Clive Rosfield SteelBook® Case, Cloth World Map of Valisthea, and digital items as well.

Finally, a new trailer, titled "Revenge", was also released! You can watch it on YouTube or at the Official Final Fantasy XVI website.

Source: Game Pressure, Final Fantasy XVI Official Site

The newest trailer for next summer's flagship Final Fantasy release, titled "Ambition," released just a bit ago from Square Enix. This newest trailer focuses more on the nations of Final Fantasy XVI's world, as well as the characters who are bonded to - and by implication, cursed by - the game's Eikons. The trailer's voiceover goes so far as to describe the events of the game as the "War of the Eikons ," and this seems apt given that most of the combat shown in the four-and-a-half-minute runtime shows battles against and between Eikons themselves. This is the first Final Fantasy trailer I've ever seen to be age-restricted on YouTube, so the embed here will be of the Japanese version as for some reason that isn't locked down the same way.Gematsu's coverage of the trailer includes some additional context from Naoki Yoshida and Hiroshi Takai, as well as the promise from Yoshida that there will be further interviews with the team published in the very near future. Yoshida describes development as being in the "home stretch" in advance of the Summer 2023 release date.

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: