You may have heard whispers several years ago that supposedly an action genre sequel was being made for Final Fantasy XII, and in Sweden of all places, produced by a company called GRIN and to be published by SquareEnix. Well, SquareEnix wasn't happy, GRIN went bankrupt, and it was at that point that fans first started hearing about the game that never was. And that was the last we'd heard of the game--codenamed Fortress--until January 2010, when a tech demo was leaked, and then again at E3 2011, when Motomu Toriyama supposedly whispered secretly that the game would never be released. Whether that last bit is true or not is still up for debate. Kind of. Maybe not, but some people still seem to have their fingers crossed.

Lately, though, gaming sites have been buzzing with previously unreleased media from the game, from concept art to bits of the sound track, leaving many fans either pouting over the loss or clenching with renewed hope and enthusiasm. Mostly the former.

You can browse the concept art at the Final Fantasy Wiki here.

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Crafter Yume Leona has a knack for making adorable photo frames out of Perler beads, and Final Fantasy appears to be one of her inspirations! Many of her frames are adorned with familiar characters, like the beloved Moogle and Chocobo!

It's also worth noting that she makes Kingdom Hearts frames. Chain of Memories fans will recognize the pixel art.

Check out some of Yume Leona's creations below! ...

Even though he's been busy lately promoting his latest game throughout Europe, Final Fantasy's papa Hironobu Sakaguchi took the time today to respond to a question from Japanese tweeter ikeda1986:


Roughly, ikeda1986 says "What's up, homie?" to which Sakagushi replies "Working on three new iOS games," which prompts ikeda1986 to say "Looking forward to it." A touching exchange indeed.

Sakaguchi resigned as executive vice president of Square in 2004, about a year after the company merged with Enix. He went on to create the Mistwalker game development corporation. You can see a list of games he's developed--often along with Final Fantasy fan favorite Nobuo Uematsu--on the corporations Wikipedia page here. Their most recent game, The Last Story (Wii), is set to release in Australia and Europe on the 23rd and 24th, respectively, and it looks fabulous.

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A new game in the Final Fantasy series released in Japan today: Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, a music and rhythm game for 3DS. It features all of our favorite characters from the series as totally cute chibis in a plot similar to Dissidia Final Fantasy, except this game is played by hitting musical notes with the 3DS stylus.


The retail version of the game includes 70 songs from the Final Fantasy series, and as of launch day Square Enix has made eight songs available for purchase via the 3DS store at a reduced price of 100¥ (regularly 150¥).

Everyone's favorite Final Fantasy songsmith Nobuo Uematsu tweeted about the game yesterday, saying that it made him tear up as he remembered his twenty years of working with these games, and that Final Fantasy fans won't want to miss it.

Unfortunately, a lot of us may have to miss it because it has not as of yet been scheduled to release outside of Japan.

[via NintendoWorldReport, AnimeNewsNetwork] ...

As soon as it was revealed that Final Fantasy XIII-2 would herald the return of chocobo racing, people got a lot more excited for the game. People love that fluff, myself included. Now, perhaps you've tried to run a few races. Maybe you've done well for yourself, maybe not. Either way you might be looking to improve, and, if that's the case, Reddit user Kheten's method seems pretty solid.

You'll be able to do this once you can get the silver chocobo out of the big projection of Cocoon in Academia 4XX. This requires Advanced Mog Throw.

Items Needed:

• 34x Potent Orb Buccaboo, Buccaboo Ace (30%)
• 46x Potent Essence Hedge Frog (15%), Mud Frog (15%), Swampmonk (20%), Caterchipillar (5%)
• 23x Potent Crystals Microchu (30%)

Monsters Needed:

• Silver Chocobo
• Pulse Gladiator (Archylte Steppe - Cloudy)
• Cactuar (Archylte Steppe - Sunny, rare)
• Microchu (Western Archylte Steppe - Rainy, Sunny)

Method:

Get your Silver Chocobo to max level.

1. Infuse the Silver Chocobo with the Pulse Gladiator at level one.

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Del Murder chose a name out of what I'm sure was a very suave hat, and that name was DMKA, one of our long-time and sometimes even well-liked members! Congratulations DMKA!

During the contest, we encouraged people to submit their favorite Final Fantasy game in the form of haiku, which lead to a lot of brilliant entries. It also lead to a lot of people revealing that they either don't know what a haiku is or they have no idea how to count syllables. Regardless, here are my top ten favorites!







In addition, Renmiri and krissy submitted poetry that are too lovely not to mention.

Final Fantasy X by Renmiri
Sins of the Father, gone
Son's tears, finding love and losing it
Father's ...

Happy 2012! To get the new year started off right, Eyes on Final Fantasy will be giving away a copy of the Final Fantasy XIII-2 Collector's Edition to one lucky member. The English release of FFXIII-2 is right around the corner (January 31) and many of us are very excited to get our hands on it. One of you will be doing so for free! Along with the game, the Collector's Edition comes with special digipack packaging, the 4-disc Official Soundtrack, and a concept art book.

Entering is simple. To enter, post in this thread telling us what your favorite Final Fantasy game is and why. Keep it short, 1 to 2 sentences, or preferably, in a haiku! Don't worry, your entry won't be judged and all entrants have an equal chance of winning. On February 3rd we will hold a random drawing to determine the lucky winner. We will then ask you for your XBOX360/Playstation 3 preference. Only one entry per member please. And no second accounts, we'll be able to tell. Sadly, staff aren't eligible , but I pre-ordered my copy anyway.

Good luck to all of you! ...

Just something fun to do...

1. VI is the first FF that allows the player to change who is in the party.

2. In the early drafts, Terra was suppose to be a guy around the age of 21.

3. While everyone knows VI has the largest cast, most don't ever mention it also has the largest number of Summons in the main series. 27 in the original version, and 31 in the GBA port.

4. One of VI's main writers was Kaori Tanaka--or more commonly known as Soraya Saga; she wrote the characters of the Figaro Bros. as well as Relm and a few other members of the cast. She went on to write the plots of Xenogears and part of Xenosaga.

5. VI is actually the first game to introduce a final boss with an Angel motif, Kefka's god mode having a total of six wings. Also, Heartless Angel (Fallen One in the Woosely script) makes its first appearance in this title.

6. Terra has more Official Artwork than any other FF character in the series (20+)

Anyway else have their own silly trivia to add? ...

On October, 21 I had the opportunity to visit Square-Enix at their offices in Los Angeles and got a sneak peek at Final Fantasy XIII-2. Below is my review from playing the first three hours of the game. It should go without saying that this only reflects my opinion. If you want to read a general overview of the event you can go here, and if you want to read a factual rundown of what we learned about FFXIII-2, check it out here. In general I had a great time at the event and enjoyed playing FFXIII-2. I cannot say enough how nice the Square-Enix NA staff was and how well they treated us. They were simply awesome. Even if this game turned out to be a steaming pile of crap I would still have enjoyed myself due to how friendly and professional they were to us. Fortunately it was not a steaming pile of crap.

Bear in mind that I only got to play the first three hours of the game, and my opinion will only be based on that time period. As we all know, many of the more fun features in these types of games often don't get unlocked until much later. For example, after playing Final Fantasy XIII for three hours you probably wouldn't even have met your full party ...

Back on October 21, Eyes on Final Fantasy got to visit Square Enix at their North America offices for a Final Fantasy XIII-2 fan event. We (ShlupQuack and myself) hung out with their PR team, got to play a 3-hour demo of FFXIII-2 (which was basically the first three hours of the game), and even met FFXIII and FFXIII-2 producer Yoshinori Kitase and art director Isamu Kamikokuryo. It was loads of fun!

After taking diligent notes through three hours of gameplay and a Q&A session with Kitase-san and Kamikokuryo-san, we've got quite a list of Final Fantasy Facts to get you all warm and ready to once again save the citizens of Gran Pulse. The Story section will give you a quick run down of what happens from the prologue through the end of chapter two, but the other sections are spoiler free (they are in spoiler tags for organizational purposes). Enjoy!

General Gameplay

• There is a jump button! Feel free to jump around freely like I did!
• Square Enix is making a real effort to step up the interactivity in this game, as evidenced by the frequency of "Cinematic Actions." Basically, a cut scene will often have a "LIVE" icon in the upper left-hand corner, which

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My complete lack of self-control lead me to hint about this a couple of times, but last month Eyes on Final Fantasy was invited to head over to Square Enix's US office to preview Final Fantasy XIII-2. Other than the occasional comment intended to titillate, we were banned from speaking of the event... until now!

We decided that the two sexiest staff members should go, so, despite Psychotics insistence that it was Opposite Day, Del Murder and I went. They put us up in a swanky city-folk hotel, and, to keep this part of the story short, we jumped on the bed, ate candy, and made rainbows. Not sexually. Necronopticous and Marshall Banana actually work right by the Square Enix building, so they picked us up for tacos and strawberry-tasting milkstuffs. I enjoyed an octopus tostada.

The next day, after having more candy for breakfast, we brought our asses and our coffee house beverages down the the lobby, where the rest of our Final Fantasy nerd group was far too easy to spot. I think there were representatives for... six other sites there. Some of them had stayed up way too late because they had never seen an ocean before; it was cute.

After collecting ...

Oh man, Final Fantasy XIV. We all know that, despite being super pretty, stability and performance issues at launch lead to two extensions of the game's trial period, costing the company what we can assume would be oodles in subscription fees, and one can imagine how many other potential customers were put off from buying the game entirely. Maybe it's stating the obvious a little, but Square Enix's CEO, Yoichi Wada, when asked about the title today at a press conference in Tokyo, responded with "The Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged." [source]

And my heart breaks a little. I know many Americans get a little frowny at the mention the MMORPG Final Fantasy titles, not because they're bad games, but because they resent them for not being another one of the standalone games that they already love (and because most of them are already wrapped up in World of Warcraft, ugh), so to hear one of those rouge Final Fantasys may be doing damage to our beloved series is quite the bummer.

They're ...

It starts tonight. Not much else to say! Head over to the official site and you can download the client software installer before the whole thing goes live.

Square-Enix is changing things up with how they handle the different regions very soon, so make sure you pick the right region.

Update: The open beta is postponed because they came across 'critical bugs'. No new release is available right now, and the download of the installer will be suspended later today.

Source: FFXIV Official Site

via Official Twitter

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I mentioned in my first news update that my focus is on Final Fantasy multimedia both offline and online. What better what to combine those to than to post photos of some excellent cosplay. Cosplay has an internet reputation for being comical, as there are many unsucessful cosplay photos floating around. On this website, we'd like to focus on promoting hard working cosplayers who succeed by putting a great deal of effort in their costume and accessories. So take a seat and prepared to be amazed by these fantastic Final Fantasy cosplayers!

Note: While we on Eyes on Final Fantasy love to give credit to all of the excellent cosplayers featured on our front site, we often are unable to find their information or name to credit them by. If you are one of the cosplayers featured on the front site and would like to be credited, please contact us via email, or better yet, contact us via the forum, and we will add your credit information ASAP! Thank you for your patience!

 

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First up: This super awesome Final Fantasy X-2 cosplay of Yuna.

 

                                                                     

"Two years since the demise of Sin, Yuna finds herself involved in a Sphere Hunting group called the Gullwings after finding a Sphere which may contain the whereabouts of her lost love, Tidus. Since she can no longer summon Aeons, she has learned to defend herself through powerful machina pistols known to her as the "Tiny Bee"."

Wow, look at all of the work put into those accessories! Truly, there is not one detail spared. And the cosplayer even ...