Square And Nintendo, E3 Lineup

With E3 coming up on us fairly fast now, we're going to start seeing some of the larger company's expected lineups for the event. eToyChest has the titles Square/Enix will be showing off at the event. Gamastura reports on one additional title that didn't make the list; A collaboration between Square/Enix and Nintendo. From that article: "The application in question combines an email application with virtual pet-like interaction abilities, and features various Pokemon characters heavily. Although Nintendo has been relatively reticent to enter the burgeoning mobile content market, which is particularly active in Japan, it has recently started to enter the segment, with the recent licensing of ring tones and animated images for a 'Nintendo Mobile' service on Japanese cellphone providers, and now this announcement of a Square collaboration."

Comments

Re:Sony

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Has anybody heard much about Sony/PS3 offerings at E3? So far, I've heard a lot more about Nintendo's upcoming stuff than I have about Sony's."

Sony's been quiet. I imagine they're going to try to wallop Nintendo at E3 with a bunch of info. My guess is we'll hear about the price, launch date, see a few games, and Sony will unveil a new PS3 controller that innovatively senses its orientation. (or a built in Eye Toy...)

The list

[Rob T Firefly]

Whittled from the first FA:

Dawn of Mana (PS2)
Dirge of Cereberus-Final Fantasy VII (PS2)
Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria (PS2)
Final Fantasy V and VI Advance (GBA)
Children of Mana (DS)
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime (DS)
Final Fantasy III (DS)
Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth (PSP)

Re:The list

[SuperMog2002]

Depends which remake you're asking about, as they're actually remaking both. The FF6 remake (and the FF5 one too) are for the GBA, and are more like glorified ports. Square Enix actually announced that they were remaking all three SNES Final Fantasies for GBA a while ago, and FF4 Advance came out last November. I imagine FF5 Advance and FF6 Advance will be quite similar. For FF4, they added a decent amount of new content, which was nicely done, but the port itself was rather shoddy. The GBA's sound processor is far superior to the SNES's, yet the music of FF4 Advance is simply inferior: it sounds like someone took every song from the original FF4 soundtrack and copied it by hand into a cheap MIDI synthesizer. Add a nice dose of very inconsistent frame rates and buggy time bars (the original version of FF4 used ATB, but didn't use time bars, nor do they really work since in FF4 you don't wait a fixed amount of time between turns like you do in later FFs), and you've got a decent but not really good port of an otherwise great game. It's better than Final Fantasy Anthology/Chronicles at least, though. I'm hoping they do a better job with FF5 and 6, but their port history says they won't.

FF3, on the other hand, is for the DS, and is a remake from the ground up. The original FF3 was a 2d game for NES, while FF3 DS is going to be a fully 3d game. That clearly indicates they're completely redoing all of the graphics, and while SNES sound may be passable, NES sound certainly isn't, so I assume they're redoing that from scratch too. They haven't announced anything about the gameplay yet that I'm aware of, but it seems clear to me that Square Enix is putting a lot of effort in to this remake, so I'm betting it'll be pretty good. Last time I saw them try this hard on a remake, the result was Final Fantasy Origins, which was a pretty darn awesome game.