Naturally, I had important family engagements last night just in time for the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth State of Play showcase from Sony, so after catching only the trailer last night I had to get up a little early to catch up. So, here's a quick recap for all of you as well, if you missed it or only saw the "short" trailer so far. Spoilers abound if you're looking to go into the game completely , so this post will simply end with the State of Play video and the rest will follow in thread ..read more

Geoff Keighley's "The Game Awards" took place again last evening, and ran probably an hour too long. I know I was certainly tired of it by the end. Square Enix, should they put much stock in these awards, would have likely left disappointed; the company won only for "Most Anticipated Game" and "Best Score and Music," leaving several other awards on the table. This is not necessarily a surprise, given that in most categories, Squenix games were up against some juggernauts of the year. On the bright side for Squenix fans, though, there were some big announcements. We'll go in chronological order ..read more

We here at CoN were notified over this past weekend about a potential past intrusion into the CoN database, which may have affected user information, including email addresses and passwords. Please note that our passwords have never been stored in plaintext, and while there's evidence suggesting that we may have been susceptible to brute force attempts to unmask user passwords, we want to assure you that we are going to do everything we can to safeguard your accounts. Let us first give our apologies for this happening; it's our belief that any information that was stolen was out of date, thoug ..read more

I've missed a lot of news recently, I get that, but it's far too late to catch up now. So instead, let's have a nice easy one to get back into things: today, Square Enix Music announced that they've released a baker's dozen of their Piano Collections albums from the Final Fantasy series to streaming platforms. It's not just a few services, either; while many of the big expected ones are there, like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube, there are five other streaming services included as well as three storefronts where the albums can be purchased and downloaded instead. The Piano Collections alb ..read more

The North American Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest began today, and as expected, producer and director Naoki Yoshida's keynote featured the announcement of the next expansion planned for the game: The theme of the expansion is "Summer Vacation", as the Warrior of Light and friends travel to what's been known previously as "The New World": , an area located in the Far West. The premise for the Warrior of Light traveling there is an invitation to a contest that will help decide the next ruler of its hub city, Tuliyollal. The Scions will be pitted against each other during the contest--just who will b ..read more

I've been remiss for quite a while at keeping everyone up on Distant Worlds (and A New World) dates. However, for the former, the Final Fantasy 35th Anniversary Program has continued apace, and there are eleven future dates coming up across the US, Canada, and Brazil: San Francisco, May 31 and June 1 The smaller chamber orchestra for A New World currently has only three shows through the rest of 2023: All shows for both series are available for ticket purchase or preorder right now. A New World: Intimate Music from Final Fantasy ..read more

Rumors had been bouncing around for the last couple days that a remaster or remake of the classic Squaresoft/Nintendo collaboration for SNES would appear at today's Direct, and so it was. The original game released in 1996 and the original was packaged up for Virtual Console on Wii and Wii U, but never for Switch, and perhaps now we know why. The game's been redone with a very nice new engine, even with the slightly-squished look of the original isometric visuals intact. The new version of the game will release on November 17, 2023. Digital preorders are available now; I assume there will be a ..read more

After the mild disappointment of the , in which we got no Final Fantasy VII, the Summer Game Fest stream that just ended gave us a little bit more of what we're looking for: a brand-new trailer for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. This had been expected for the last week or so, when the official Twitter accounts in both Japanese and English started posting semi-cryptic updates about the progress of the game, and users noticed that they started exactly seven days before Keighley's SGF. Bad news out of the way, first - the trailer locks in a mostly-assumed bit of news, that the game is delayed now unt ..read more

Sony's Playstation Showcase ended a little bit ago, and while there were a lot of very grabby games involved (go do some Googling for Sword of the Sea, Neva, and the Metal Gear Solid and Spider-Man news if you've got a Playstation 5), the only thing that got rebirthed was the Marathon IP from Bungie. If you were looking for Square Enix in the hour-long presentation, your options were a bit limited; we can start with the announcement of a new team-based 4v4 shooter called "Foamstars," which appears to be made up primarily of OG Fortnite and Splatoon vibes. It's a third-person shooter where the ..read more

A new prequel novel set in the Final Fantasy VII universe released in English earlier this week, entitled "Final Fantasy VII Remake: Traces of Two Pasts." The novel, written by Kazushige Nojima (the primary scenario writer behind both the game's original PS1 release as well as 2020's Remake) and translated to English by Stephen Kohler (whose other Square Enix-related translations include Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future and NieR:Automata - YoRHa Boys), explores the childhoods of characters Tifa Lockhart and Aerith Gainsborough, with roughly half of the book devoted to each character's ..read more