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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)

A bit of Final Fantasy XVI news leaked out during last night's "Letter from the Producer LIVE" for Final Fantasy XIV: Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, who has been translating Final Fantasy XIV for quite some time now, is also now working on the translation for Final Fantasy XVI.

Along with being one of the translators at last year's Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest, Koji Fox has also written the lyrics to the some of the most beloved songs from XIV, including To the Edge.

More news about Final Fantasy XVI is due to be released this spring.

Source: Final Weapon