A fairly well-sized (long) announcement, I've been collecting information all week:
Control F - Copy these exactly:
Tokyo Game Show
[TGS]
Final Fantasy Dissidia
[FFD]
Final Fantasy Remix Album
[FFR]
Square-Enix Members
[SQEXM]
Chrono Trigger
[CTDS]
And
do not quote this post!
Tokyo Game Show 2008 ~ October [TGS]
Tetsuya Nomura has announced that Final Fantasy XIII will be shown this year, after the rumour of it being shown at the E3 Convention, there also should be a promotional section on Final Fantasy: Dissidia.
Sadly Nomura has also announced that Final Fantasy Versus XIII has been put on a minor hold as the Development Division in charge of it have been called in for reinforcements for Final Fantasy XIII - however the plot/scenarios' have been finished but there is still a fair amount of work to be done but XIII requires more work on character renders and costumes (there is also a rumour along with this announcement that we may be able to change some of the characters' outfits). So there will not be much new footage from Versus XIII shown if shown at all at the Tokyo Game Show or at their Private Party DKΣ3713 due to this reason. Nomura and the Development Divisions apologized for this but felt that with the amount of mail they have gotten about the Fabula Nova Crystallis project that they should announce the delay.
Final Fantasy: Dissidia [FFD]
Nomura has announced that the game is about fifty-percent complete more-or-less and characters can be leveled up to Lv. 100, during gameplay in any type of battle or depending on the current gameplay mode you can open treasure chests to unlock bonus items, weapons and possibly characters may be unlocked with either combination of leveling and hidden treasure chests. Some items may be limited within the game to a certain number or to be set for use by one specific character only.
To the treasure chests, they may be hidden within some areas of the game's environment which match the details of some areas/environments' during gameplay will be hittable meaning that it can be destroyed if hit a certain amount to reveal hidden treasure chests or items which may be put into a game mode of requiring to find hidden markers across the field whilst being attacked.
And the only characters shown will be the ones that have been announced officially on their playable demo and overall no plot-ruining scenes will be shown or released at the Tokyo Game Show unless something is leaked by then (which was the case on another project - Kingdom Hearts II with some Final Fantasy cameo characters being leaked even after Nomura firmly stated to the division that he did not want those characters leaked under any circumstances).
To also stop the rumour going around about Dissidia's release date, Nomura has also stated firmly that there is no confirmed date as of yet.
Images from Dissidia:
Scan from Jump:
First
Scan from Famitsu:
First
Second
Screens from leaked trailer/Closed Theatre trailer (featured from Famitsu) :
First
Second
Remix Album [FFR]
Album Cover
(it's a Bomb within an optical illusion - many people have complained about the choice of the cover).
If you caanot see it, then you can look at the version of the album cover that I have coloured.
Album Cover Coloured
Also a
Final Fantasy Remix album is being worked on by two DJs' - Ian Hartley and Matt Bagiani, whilst being overseen by Nobuo Uematsu himself.
Some of the announced tracks are the following:
Final Fantasy - Prelude
Final Fantasy III - Eternal Wind
Final Fantasy VII - J-E-N-O-V-A
Final Fantasy VIII - Maybe I'm a Lion
Final Fantasy XI - Ronfaure
More tracks are to be announced soon, it will also specifically feature tracks from the roots of the Final Fantasy series so the newer game tracks confirmed will be second to the old ones apparently.
Square-Enix MEMBERS (Japan) [SQEXM]
Square-Enix on their
Members section have just released a new application called
Square-Enix Members TV, on which they will be releasing trailers and news that may not generally be featured on their main site or released straight-away to Japanese gaming magazines such as Jump or Famitsu.
Screenshot of the MEMBERS TV
((I've edited my desktop's background as the colours would have been distractive))
The crystal and the screen can be moved around the desktop freely, you can also change the colour of the crystal itself and bring up news articles and other information either regarding the company, it's productions or it's Members section. It also shows the time and date set on your compute. The text is in Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji - borrowed Chinese characters) and for the most part can be copied and pasted into a translating program if required. The crystal is also animated - it shines, the numbers on the clock fall and fade off in the crystal whenever the time or date changes and the smaller crystals (or what they have been referred to by some people on the Members section - Materia) float around the crystal, clicking on those will bring up articles of interest otherwise you can bring up a small menu.
The word going around is that we may see some trailers from their Closed Mega Theatre sometime or even some shown of gameplay footage taken at their private party - DKΣ3713 of the playable demos of the listed games - one of main interest has been the Final Fantasy Dissidia demo and the Fabula Nova Crystallis trailers.
The Square-Enix MEMBERS Virtual World will be released into Beta next week on Tuesday, only eight-hundred people on the MEMBERS section will be able to attend their virtual event within the world to receive the Beta version which has been greatly enlarged in comparison to their
Alpha Version.
Square-Enix MEMBERS (America) [SQEXM]
An interview with Kenichiro Yuji - the director of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Little King / My Life as King has been uploaded for viewing. There should be some games and other things from the Japanese side of the MEMBERS section soon.
Chrono Trigger [CTDS]
Also, I forgot to mention (for quite some time, wasn't sure if anyone noticed - I remembered when I was talking about the Chrono series earlier) about spotting something which was a reference to Chrono Trigger.
Square-Enix also have this
Countdown Site, the pocket-watch counting down and the page name for the site itself (within the URL) seem to be an absolute reference to a Chrono Trigger game either being: ported, remade or that Chrono game we were promised years ago - that became known as vaporware.
Nomura has also announced that all of the Japanese script has been recorded, the size of the game itself will be double or possibly triple the size of Crisis Core and apparently there is a section of the script in Dissidia that will match Crisis Core in some manner or so Nomura has hinted. That's all of the information he's going to release over it and a small suggestion that he may release more information on it soon but made note of being unwilling to give details on characters appearing in Dissidia other than those which have already been announced.