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They must be further along than they are letting on, or they are being fairly optimistic: Square Enix announed last night at the Final Fantasy VII Reunion Concert that the long-awaited remake is due to release on March 3 of next year.

Most of the new trailer that accompanied the announcement was still from the game's prologue, but it does seem to indicate more clearly that the battle system looks to be closer to Final Fantasy XV than a modified ATB system. The new trailer is also bookended by a brief shot of Shin-ra and Aerith dropping her flowers in terror. In the middle there appears to be a first glance at Cloud using a Limit Break!

Squenix say that we can expect more details tonight at their pre-E3 showcase. I'm an old man but I can probably stay awake for that.

Source: Square Enix Facebook

It's been over two years since Square Enix announced the setup of Studio Istolia, headed by Hideo Baba, and Project Prelude Rune. It's been three-quarters of a year since we last heard anything significant in terms of news from the studio, too. Since then, Hideo Baba left Square Enix entirely, as it appears that I missed last month. That's usually not a good sign for a studio that has yet to produce a game, and it appears that is true here, too.

As of yesterday, all social media accounts for Studio Istolia were closed down, and as much evidence of the original trailers as Squenix could was purged from the internet. Apparently the Studio Istolia website had been redirecting users back to the main Square Enix site since around the time Baba left the studio and the company. Square Enix have yet to comment officially on this change, but the logical conclusion is that the studio and game are both now dead.

Update: Square Enix have confirmed that the studio has been shuttered.

Source: Siliconera, GamesIndustry

The next round of dates for Distant Worlds and A New World were announced late last week, carrying us largely through the fall for the former and into early 2020 for the latter. It's been since January and November respectively since we got new show information, so some of these new dates might be up your alley. For Distant Worlds:

• Seattle, September 11 and 12

For A New World:

• Austin, October 4
• Oklahoma City, October 5
• Quebec City, November 23
• Kansas City, January 17, 2020

Tickets are on sale for all of these shows.

I'd also missed that ANW released a second album of recordings at the start of the year. I saw a tweet the other day mentioning that the album would also be appearing on streaming services soon, but I don't yet see it on my Spotify. Keep your eyes out if you've read this far.

Source: Distant Worlds, A New World

I mentioned in a thread at the forums yesterday that Square Enix staff seemed pretty excited about today's State of Play presentation by Sony. Turns out they had good reason to be, as part of that presentation was a debut trailer with cutscenes and battle gameplay from the FF7 remake that has long been in the works!

It's just a minute long, and it mainly focuses upon the very early stages of the game that introduce us to AVALANCHE in the Reactor raid. We also get a glimpse of Aerith and Cloud's first interaction, though, and at the very end a little tiny bit of Sephiroth himself. It's still hard to tell whether the battles are going to go into an all-action mode, or whether they are just a very, very fancy variant of ATB, but what you can see already looks very pretty indeed.Source: Siliconera

Square Enix announced last week that for the first time ever, an official symphonic concert dedicated to the soundtrack of Final Fantasy VII will premiere in Los Angeles. The date will be June 9, a couple days before this year's E3 kicks off, and it will play at the Dolby Theatre at 6pm for one show.

The concert will include over a hundred live musicians conducted by Arnie Roth, with new arrangements and a new HD video presentation to be played as the concert goes. Tickets are on sale now and range from $77.77 (ha!) to $139.

The timing of doing an all-FF7 concert just before E3 is interesting, with the remake in the works. One might take this to mean that there will be some real information on the remake at E3 this year, in which case we've got just a month or so left to wait.

Source: Gematsu, WildFaery

Still speculative, but it was reported today that the body responsible for age-rating games in South Korea (known as the Game Rating and Administration Committee of Korea) has given a rating for PCs for Octopath Traveler, the Square Enix Switch RPG. The publisher of record is Bandai Namco, who according to Gematsu regularly act as the Korean-locale publisher for Square Enix games.

There is always the chance that this could be an erroneous listing, but typically news such as this from a game ratings board is always followed by an official announcement or an actual release of a game. Given further that the game was originally developed in Unreal Engine, a PC port seems like an obvious next step as well. Keep your eyes out for more news soon.

Source: Gematsu