News

As the release date approaches, we're getting more and more news on the next non-online FF game; FFXII. Courtesy of RPGamer , here are Eight New Screenshots of various scenes, mostly two of the characters, and One New Artwork of the character Pannero.

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I like how the game is looking so far. Although one of those characters still looks like Tidus, the others look interesting. The style of graphics doesn't seem to be too much of a leap from FFX and FFX-2, and it looks like the technology is about the same.

An expansion pack for FFXI is coming out this fall, called Chains of Promathia. According to the press release found at playonline.com , it will change FFXI in "ways not before imagined".

Source: World Wide Gaming Alliance

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It's nice to see that the online world of FFXI is still healthy and growing.

According to RPGamer, Nintendo has reportedly asked Square Enix to produce a new version of Final Fantasy III for the Game Boy Advance. As the story suggests, Final Fantasy III hasn't seen the light of day since the original Famicom release - the Wonderswan Color version was badly hampered by the premature demise of the system.

Final Fantasy III has never been released in the United States. However, if there's a GBA version done in Japan, there's very little stopping it from coming here. The GBA, unlike the WSC, has brand identity and a stranglehold on the portable gaming market. Given the massive brand appeal of the Final Fantasy franchise and the novelty of the particular title, it seems reasonable that we could finally have a full official translation of this poor forgotten game sooner than we thought.

Just a few quick tidbits from the wonderful world of gaming.

The first is that a sequel to Paper Mario has finally been confirmed. The game is being developed by Intelligent Systems, the Nintendo in-house team that developed the original title.

The sequel will retain the unique art style of the original: "paper thin" sprites in a fully 3D world. There is no set release date as of yet for the title. One might recognize the Intelligent Systems label as it has been the force behind such titles as Donkey Kong, Excitebike, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Tetris Attack, Super Metroid and the Fire Emblem series.

Source: Gameforms

The second scrumptious tidbit of the day involves money and not an actual game. More concretely, it is that Microsoft has lowered the price of the Xbox to $149.99. The drop places it in the middle for lowest price of the three major consoles.

This might make the console more appealing to gamers recently leaning towards purchasing a Gamecube instead because of its much lower price point of $99.99

Source: Games_Are_Fun

Four months after it's PC release, Final Fantasy XI has now made its way to the Playstation 2 console.

The delay of the release, according to Game Revolution, was due partially to Square Enix's desire to monitor success of the PC version and to the necessity of a marketed PS2 hard drive to store information for the game.

Additional information about the PS2 release, as well as screenshots from the PS2 version, can be found at Gamezone.com.

With all of its well publicized troubles, Disney still has a few bright spots. One of those is Kingdom Hearts. Disney Interactive and Square Enix have jointly announced that more than four million copiesof the title have shipped worldwide.

North America is actually outselling Japan moving two million units compared to the 1.23 million in the latter area. Europe has chipped in with 820,000 copies. Square Enix U.S.A.'s president and CEO Jun Iwasaki, was quoted "The unique blend of Disney characters and worlds in a Square Enix style gameplay seen in KINGDOM HEARTS resulted in one remarkable game. We couldn’t be happier with the results"

Kingdom Hearts was recently added to the Sony's "Greatest Hits" label. There is a Kingdom Hearts Gameboy Advance title in the works as well as a sequel to the original title.

In other Square Enix news, GameTrailers.com has a new Final Fantasy XII trailer available for download on their website. The trailer is from a recently released Famitsu DVD (For those not in the know, Famitsu is a popular gaming magazine in Japan).

Source: Games_Are_Fun