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A King's Tale, a Final Fantasy XV sidestory previously available only with certain preorders of the main game, is now available to everyone on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4. And it's free! The game is a sort of prequel to Final Fantasy XV, and takes place as a bedtime story told by King Regis to a young Prince Noctis. Unlike the action RPG of the main title, this side game is a 2.5D, sprite-based sidescrolling beat-em-up with a Final Fantasy flair.

The game features King Regis as the main character, with access to battle assistance from his friends - like father, like son. He's got access to a variety of weapons, magic, and summons to fight against monsters from the Final Fantasy XV universe, expressed also as sprites.

Again, the game is available worldwide for download today, for free, with no purchase of the original game required. Enjoy!

Source: EuroGamer

If you missed Star Ocean: Till the End of Time when it was first released on PlayStation 2, you missed one of the better games in the series, in fact the one often cited as best. While the newest edition was not reviewed as kindly, Till the End of Time stands up, and now PlayStation 4 gamers are going to have a chance to try it out.

The new release will be digital download only, and if you're expecting something akin to what Square Enix has done with recent Final Fantasy remakes, you might be a little disappointed. While Final Fantasy X and XII were heavily tuned for their newer releases, the Director's Cut of TtEoT will instead be upscaled through software, and the cutscenes have not been re-rendered into HD. The game clearly does look better in comparisons, but those expecting a sea change or increases in playable content will likely be disappointed.

As of now, there is no release date or purchase price available.

Source: Siliconera

Announced yesterday, Square Enix has created a new games studio in Tokyo called "Studio Istolia." This new studio, interestingly named with an English word and a Greek one, will be run by Hideo Baba, recently known as a producer in the long-running "Tales" series of RPGs. The new studio was announced as a bit of a footnote to the announcement of a new project called "Project Prelude Rune," which will be the first project produced by Baba in the new studio.

Prelude Rune is described as being a new IP for Square Enix, and will be an RPG "unfolding across a vast land teeming with life." This will not be the final title for the game or games produced under this banner. Obviously, as a brand-new studio, not many details about the long-term timeline of the project are available, and many are not likely to be forthcoming soon as the studio has listed staff openings numbering at least fifteen.

A final note, their logo looks like a cross between the Final Fantasy XV Carbuncle and a moogle. So perhaps this new apple is falling not so far from the tree.

Source: Gematsu, Studio Istolia

Good news, everyone! Square-Enix wants to hear from you, following their launch of Final Fantasy XV! They have launched a survey on surveymonkey to gather and compile player feedback: you can take it here.

It starts off with some pretty basic questions to help them with marketing tools and see what systems you play on and where you get your news from (Why the hell isn't Caves of Narshe on there, right?!), with 30 questions in all. But it gets interesting at the end, where they ask questions like:

• Please tell us what you think of Final Fantasy XV.
• In one or two brief sentences, please tell us how you feel about Season Passes & DLC.
• If you ask one thing to the developers of FINAL FANTASY XV, what would it be?

So now is your chance to make your voice heard, in a place Square Enix may actually read! Now, if the comments were made public, I guarantee there would be some entertaining reads in there. While we're at it, feel free to add any additional comments here!

Source: GameSpot

Just a couple weeks ago, Wired reported a Mozilla announcement that half of all web traffic is served over secure HTTP, for the first time. As a user of the web yourself, you should be excited about this - obviously, sites that want your financial or very personal information have been secured for a very long time, but adding HTTPS to other sites is also a great thing. As Wired explains, a secured site makes it harder for people to intercept the things you're reading or posting out to the internet, and it helps you be sure that no malicious groups are intercepting your traffic and leveraging it for their own means.

Today, CoN has thrown in its lot with this half-and-growing chunk of the web by switching all traffic to secure protocols. All images, scripts and text you see in your browser will now be secured, including all forum traffic, news, and fanart submissions and posts. This improves the quality of the content that we're able to provide to you, and also unlocks the ability for us to extend our reach further into social media in the future.

You should now be seeing the pretty green padlock on all of the pages you visit on CoN, at least in browsers that make it easy for you to see such things (I can personally vouch for Firefox, Chrome, and Chrome for iOS!). It's possible that there are still some pages that might not be fully secure due to me missing an image or two, so please feel free to let me know if you encounter one, or if you have any questions about this update. This is the kind of nerdy stuff I like talking about, so don't be shy!

Many new shows were announced for the Distant Worlds concert tour back in December, but many more have joined the tour for the celebration of Final Fantasy's 30th anniversary. The expanded tour dates span 8 total days across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

• Sydney, Australia: July 1
• Chicago, Illinois: September 16
• London, England: November 4
• Lyon, France: November 18
• Toronto, Canada: December 2
• Osaka, Japan: December 8
• Tokyo, Japan: December 9-10

The larger list of tour dates intrigues me as a citizen of Chicago, so I'll be getting my tickets as soon as they go on sale tomorrow, 14 February. It was well worth my time the last time I attended and I can't wait to go back, especially since I now know that there should be abundant 3DS StreetPass opportunities. Anybody else going to get tickets for one of these shows, or one of the earlier-announced dates?

Source: Distant Worlds