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Despite rumors to the contrary following its announcement last year, Dragon Quest IX: Protectors of the Starry Sky will not be featuring an action-oriented battle system and will stick to the tried-and-true turn-based system that has been a feature of every game in the Dragon Quest main series.

However, there are still a few adjustments being made to the DQ formula. Enemies will now be visible in the open field and running into an enemy will trigger a battle, not unlike the battle systems from Chrono Trigger (which had several traditional Dragon Quest staff on its team). Battles will be in full 3D in the same vein as the PS2's Dragon Quest VIII, and DQ IX will also support multiplayer co-op at any stage of the game using the DS's wireless multiplayer capabilities. Also, for the first time in the series, the main character's appearance will be fully customizable by the player - everything from a character's weight to facial features is player-controlled.

Dragon Quest IX is shaping up to be quite different from many of its predecessors, but it is being made by virtually the exact same team that created Dragon Quest VIII - the studios of Yuji Horii, Akira Toriyama, and Koichi Sugiyama, as well as the independent developer Level-5. Dragon Quest IX is scheduled for a 2007 release in Japan.

Source: 1UP

Good news for those gamers who haven't grabbed one of the FF1/FF2 remakes yet and who own a PSP: Final Fantasy I and II are heading your way this summer.

Originally announced only for Japan, the remastered versions of the first two games in our favourite series will mark the twentieth anniversary of Final Fantasy. The original Final Fantasy will appear on 26 June 2007, followed shortly by Final Fantasy II on 24 July. Both games will go for $29.99.

Source: Gamespot

Honestly, I have a hard time getting excited over this. You can already buy these games together on the original Playstation for far less than the combined price of $60, and can't you rip PS1 games onto memory sticks if you just have to make them portable?

I just don't see the appeal. Square is releasing two of the weaker games in the series separately at an expensive price for a handheld no one can afford to own. Why bother?

"Final Fantasy Forever", a compilation of all twelve games in the Final Fantasy series, will be hitting the PS3 along with Final Fantasy XIII sometime in the third quarter of 2008.

The six-disc collection will retail for $149.99 and include a 120 page art booklet with character designs and extra information about each game in the series. Each game will be released in its original form (though Americans will finally be receiving Final Fantasy X International) with no translation changes or graphics updates.

Source: GameSpot

According to an interview with SCE France CEO Georges Fornay, the upcoming PS3 game Final Fantasy XIII may be available on more than one platform. This only qualifies as hearsay at the moment, but such words coming from the mouth of an important Sony executive are worth notice. The interview was published in the Francophone newspaper "Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace" ("The Final News from Alsace").

Sony's PS3 has had it rough recently, to say the least. Without going into too much detail, it can be surmised that the young system has been recently suffering from a great deal of criticism from game developers and publishers, from gaming news media, and from the gaming public themselves while the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft XBox 360 have been thriving in the new generation of video game consoles. Of particular note is the diminishing list of potential blockbusters for the PS3 - several extremely promising games that were originally billed as exclusive to Sony's new-gen hardware have announced releases for Microsoft's Xbox 360, among them Saints' Row, Assassin's Creed, and most recently Devil May Cry 4.

If this tidbit from France turns out to be true, then Sony will probably have yet another bevy of expectant gamers leave the PS3's bandwagon. Final Fantasy has been one of the most powerful franchises in video games since its birth, and its main-series games have been among the crown jewels in Sony's library from the past two generations. If FF XIII decides to shed its exclusivity status, then Sony is in even worse trouble than anyone may have suspected.

Source: Gamespot

A recent developer blog post by Square-Enix's Tetsuya Nomura revealed a great deal of new information regarding the Fabula Nova Crystalis project, which comprises the PS3 games Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Versus XIII, as well as the cell phone game Final Fantasy Agito XIII.

The world of Final Fantasy XIII is called "Cocoon," and it uses crystal technology to create a highly advanced society. It is also completely surrounded by a large shell, which protects Cocoon and its inhabitants from all manner of evil residing outside of the shell, whose space is collectively called "Pulse." Cocoon's government reacts to the threat of the Pulse lurking monsters with "drastic measures," and uses the threat of exiling Cocoon citizens to Pulse as a means of controlling the people. Lightning, FF XIII's protagonist, is "chosen by the Crystal" to stop "those who would destroy the world," but Nomura (who is working on FF XIII as a character designer) was vague on any details otherwise.

Summons are going to be handled very differently in Final Fantasy XIII than in past FF games. They still serve as allies of our protagonist, but have some very unusual abilities; for example, the summon Shiva can now be transformed into a motorcycle, which Lightning can ride during battle. Somehow, this action-oriented feature is going to be implemented in a classic ATB system, but Nomura also stated that the game's developers are having "difficulties" implementing these new features.

Final Fantasy Versus XIII, an entirely separate game on its own, is supposedly set in a single kingdom within the same universe as Final Fantasy XIII and features a conflict centered over the last remaining crystal of said kingdom. The still-unnamed main character is a silver-haired swordsman who can teleport to any location where his sword is thrown. FF Versus XIII is being directed by Nomura himself and will use an action-oriented game engine based on the Kingdom Hearts series. Neither FF XIII nor FF Versus XIII has received a release date yet.

Final Fantasy Agito XIII is going to be a fully-3D cell phone game that centers on protecting another one of these crystals. That's essentially all that is known about Agito thus far, that and the fact that it doesn't have a release date either.

Source: RPGFan

Yes, you heard correctly. The ninth entry of the fabled RPG series is going to be on the Nintendo DS. Very little concrete info has been released thus far, but we know that it's going to be called Dragon Quest IX: Defenders of the Stars and it's going to be co-developed by the Dragon Quest dearm team (Yuji Horii, etc.) and Level-5, virtually the same team that brought us Dragon Quest VIII for the PS2 a year ago. Horii himself stated in the press release that this DS game is "not a gaiden or side-story, but a true part of the series."

This is great news for fans of the series, who are unfortunately accustomed to long delays in between DQ titles (there were five years between the releases of DQ VI and DQ VII, followed by four years between DQ VII and DQ VIII). It is certainly unexpected for Square-Enix to put the next iteration of such a major series on a handheld system, but it might just be a testament to the overwhelming popularity and developer support of the Nintendo DS in Japan. In any case, the tentative release date for Dragon Quest IX is "mid-2007."

source: N-sider