News

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:

Sony's latest State of Play just ended, and the final showing was a new trailer for Final Fantasy XVI! Here it is:



The PlayStation Blog was also updated to include more information about the game, including the reveal of the main team working on the game:

Producer: Naoki Yoshida
Main Director: Hiroshi Takai
Creative Director & Original Screenplay: Kazutoyo Maehiro
Localization Director: Michael-Christopher Koji Fox
Art Director: Hiroshi Minagawa
Combat Director: Ryota Suzuki
Character Design: Kazuya Takahashi
Composer: Masayoshi Soken

Immediately after the State of Play ended, KupoCon (the Final Fantasy fan convention) announced a launch tour will be happening for the game. More details will come later, but the tour will be held in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, with a virtual option for those who cannot attend in person.

Source: PlayStation YouTube Channel, PlayStation Blog, KupoCon Official Site

Square Enix is due to sell studios Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montreal, and Square Enix Montreal to Embracer Group for an estimated $300 million USD. The deal still needs regulatory approval, but once given, should be finalized sometime between July and September of this year.

This sale will mean Square Enix will no longer own the properties of Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief, and Legacy of Kain, along with a back-catalogue of more than 50 games. Crystal Dynamics is already working on a new Tomb Raider game.

Square Enix has said that this deal was made so they could invest in fields including blockchain, AI, and the cloud.

In unrelated news, Square Enix registered several new trademarks recently. These trademarks include Fear Effect and Relic Strike. The former was a game released by Eidos in 2000 for the original PlayStation, so there is speculation the series is about to be revived.

Other recent trademarks filed include Valkyrie Profile and Lenneth, which might indicate those games are to make their way to PS Plus Premium subscription.

Source: The Verge, PCMag, MP1ST

We're a few days late with this news: Square Enix has launched a music channel on YouTube, featuring over 5,500 songs from its video game collection.

The channel has reached 66.7k subscribers in the past few days. All fifteen main games in the Final Fantasy series are covered, along with other of the company's franchises. You'll find soundtracks for the SaGa, MANA, Chrono, and NieR series as well as other titles.

The channel includes an introductory video, which you can view here:Source: GameRant

Sony's State of Play stream just ended, and we saw some updates and new reveals from Square Enix.

First up was a very brief look at Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. The game is set to release on March 18th, 2022, and a new playable demo drops today.

The next look we saw was for Forspoken, which recently had its release date pushed back to October 11th, 2022. They showed off a lengthy gameplay trailer, which you can see here:Finally, the half-hour long presentation ended with reveals for two new Square Enix games.

The first shown was The Diofield Chronicle, which is described on PlayStation's official YouTube channel as "An all new Tactical RPG [..] introducing the new "Real-Time Tactical Battle". It's due to come out this year. Here's the trailer:The final reveal was Valkyrie Elysium, another new game releasing this year. Take a look at it here:Source: PlayStation YouTube Channel

Square Enix have just launched a new microsite in the run-up to the 35th anniversary of the original Final Fantasy's launch in Japan, which will be on December 18th of this year. It's quite limited in content so far, though they did publish the site for both English-speaking and Japanese audiences. So far, it mainly has a message from Yoshinori Kitase and links to a couple Final Fantasy-adjacent games coming soon, Chocobo GP and Stranger of Paradise.

With nine months left until the actual anniversary date, the site promises more to come so there's a wide variety of things that could show up. Possibly even more Final Fantasy XVI news?

Source: Final Fantasy 35th Anniversary Special Site (English)