News: Final fantasy v and vi announced for GBA, other squarish mysteries

October 05, 2005, 02:32 AM

by tim, via g-para, square-enix -
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An article on G-Para highlights some announcements at the Nintendo DS conference today. It turns out that Square-Enix has announced plans to release Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI on Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. It is surprisingly noble of them to wait twenty-four whole hours after the opening of the Final Fantasy IV Advance official homepage. (You will of course remember the summer of 2000, when Square announced Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy XI all on the same day.)

Also at the conference, Square announced that they are indeed still working on Final Fantasy III for Nintendo's DS, and that the game is a remake rather than a port. They are stressing the "remake" part pretty heavily. Which means, yeah, it'll probably involve scraping the hell out of the bottom screen to cause maximum damage.

Other interesting things revealed lately on the Squeenix front include that Seiken Densetsu mastermind Kouchi Ishii will indeed produce the DS Children of Mana, which means it might be pretty good, and that Romancing SaGa's lovely talented music composer Kenji Ito will be scoring most of the soundtrack. Official site here. Enticing!

Finally, and most bizarrely interesting of them all, is that Square-Enix will be developing Mario Basket 3 on 3, a Super Mario-themed basketball game for the Nintendo DS. I mean, I can understand getting Camelot, makers of Hot Shots Golf, to make Mario Golf and Mario Tennis, or getting Namco's Family Stadium team to do Mario Baseball, (do I need to show the picture of the Goomba again?) though heck, it's kind of mysterious what made Nintendo think Square-Enix was a shoe-in for Mario Basketball. Was it the jumping segments in Kingdom Hearts that tipped them off? Oh, I kid. It might be fun, especially if they work out a way to slam-dunk with the stylus. That's a joke, too. Either way, rumors will be circulating starting tomorrow about the appearances of Square's 1995 Super NES Super Mario RPG's classic characters Booster, Geno, and Mallow. These would mark the greatest cameos in a basketball game since Mario and Luigi jammed in EA's NBA Street.

Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI will go on sale sometime toward the middle of next year, for probably 7,000 yen each. (No exaggerration intended.)