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Square Enix @ E3 - All Final Fantasy, All the time (plus mobile phone games)

I meant to find time yesterday evening to write up a report on Square-Enix's Press conference, but right as I sat down to start it, the Sony press conference started up. Luckily, I'm in the middle of a five-hour flight across the country right now, and that's plenty of time to write a recap.

Squeenix's Press conference this year was largely about two things: release dates of known projects and Final Fantasy XIII. There were a couple other new product announcements, but largely it was about known stuff and FF13. So lets run down the list.

MANA SERIES

• Children of Mana - DS - Summer/Fall 2006 - Classic top-down 2D Mana game.
• Dawn of Mana - PS2 - Release TBA - Fully 3D game, new for the Mana series.

FF PORTS

• FFIII - DS - September 2006 - First time FF3 will show up stateside. The real FF3.
• FFV - GBA - Late 2006 - Still just a straight port.
• FFVI - GBA - Late 2006 - Also still just a straight port, but should be awesome regardless.

VALKYRIE PROFILE PORTS

• Valkyrie Profile - PSP - 18 JUN 2006
• Valkyrie Profile 2 - PS2 - September 2006

FF12

• FFXII - PS2 - October 2006 - Localization is coming along very nicely. They went all-out on high quality voice actors.

DRAGON QUEST

• Rocket Slime - DS - September 2006 - Might be a port of Slime MoriMori Dragon Quest?
• Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors - Wii - Launch title for the Wii. Hilariously long title, wouldn't be surprised if that changes.

MOBILE STUFF

• Squeenix is jumping head-first into the mobile market. They're pushing not only a ton of Final Fantasy-based mobile games, but also leveraging their acquisition of Taito to get classic Taito games out on mobile platforms. Will anyone care? Time will tell. Even if no one cares, that probably won't stop them, because they seem REALLY committed to phone gaming.

FF: CRYSTAL CHRONICLES

• Ring of Fates - DS - Just Starting Development - It'll be a Crystal Chronicles game, with 4 player wireless multiplayer, and they promise to make it have a worthwhile single player story.
• Crystal Bearers - Wii - Just Starting Development

COMPILATION OF FF7

• Dirge of Cerberus - PS2 - 22 AUG 2006 - New levels / features are being added for the stateside release. hopefully some of those additions include "make the game fun".
• Before Crisis - Phones - "Soon" - Even the Turks can't make mobile phone games attractive. Think about this, Squeenix. Please think about this.
• Crisis Core - PSP - Date TBA - Crisis Core is a Zack / Cloud / Sephiroth game, which I know nothing about.
• After these, FF7 is done. Seriously. Please stop. Please. Now.

FINAL FANTASY 13 [The main event!]

• For reasons I apparently don't "get", they're making three FFXIII games. Here they are:
• FFXIII - PS3 - Core game, based in a far-future setting where "magic and technology have merged and evolved" [I suggest we call this combination "Magitek", and perhaps have it powered by "Espers"]. It's being made by the FFX team, with the director from FFX-2. Apparently they were doing it for PS2, then they paused to make the FF7 PS3 tech demo. After that they threw out everything and made what we've seen of FF13 from scratch, over the past year.
• Versus XIII - PS3 - Not a whole lot is known about this, except that Tetsuya Nomura is taking the Kingdom Hearts team, pairing them with the Advent Children team, and making a very pretty touchy-feely game about "bonding". I think we should expect zippers. So many zippers.
• Agito XIII - Mobile Phones - ACES, ANOTHER SQUEENIX MOBILE PHONE GAME!
• Squeenix is calling the FF13 project as a whole the "Fabula Nova Crystallis" project, Latin for "The new tale of the crystal". Squeenix apparently has some kind of massive hardon for Latin as of late.
• The really weird thing about this project is that none of the games - as far as they've told us - are in the same world. It's not going to be like Compilation of FF7, where there's like, 38 games all in the same closely-knit deeply involved world. Instead, they're looking to build a whole new Final Fantasy "Mythology", and then tie the games together with that. Expect confusion once both FFXIII and Versus XIII are both on sale.

So . . it looks like a lot, and from one company it is, but these are largely all products we knew were in development. We just have a bunch of dates now. And as the development of the projects we knew of winds down, new projects get announced. We'll be looking for more in-depth stuff about all these projects once the expo actually starts, and will be reporting on what we find worth talking about.

Now . . On to Nintendo and Microsoft . . .

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