To be fair, the downloadable content for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Dark Lord came out the same day the game was released on WiiWare, and Square Enix waited a whole two days before releasing paid DLC for Gyromancer, but much of it is every bit as ridiculous.

Like Dark Lord’s paid DLC, four of the seven items available for Gyromancer are items to use in battle to earn you an advantage over a foe. For 40 Microsoft points apiece, or $US0.50, you can purchase the Magic Key, Remedy, Magick Mirror or Hock of Meat items, each having some sort of beneficial effect on the game board.

Microtransactions don’t get much more micro than this, folks.

A bit more useful are the three new maps Square Enix has released for 240 points apiece. Each of the three maps — Dragon’s Haven, Rivel’s Trial and The Four — include new monsters you can add to your stable of fighting beasts. In The Four, you must defeat three guardian monsters before facing off against the strongest monster in the game. Well, the strongest monster in the game once you spend $US3 at least.

I’m all for downloadable content, but when it comes this soon after a game’s release and offers relatively little value it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The new maps and packs for Gyromancer are now available on Xbox Live and Steam.

Square Enix will be publishing Supreme Commander 2 in North America on March 2 of next year on the PC and March 16 for the Xbox 360. To celebrate the announcement, they’ve released a video of Chris Taylor, Founder and Creative Director of Gas Powered Games, walking us through a typical battle. It looks like exactly what I was shown at E3 2009, actually, only without Chris Taylor actually being in the room with you.

I count myself among the drooling masses at this point, though more from the gameplay angle. I’m a tattooed and true FF fan, but I felt pretty let down by numbers XI and XII. So far XIII is looking to return to a play style I’m more familiar with, allowing me to focus on enjoying the story instead of constantly bitching about coloured arching lines travelling between the characters and their enemies.

Shonen Jump: New Final Fantasy XIII Scans [Final Fantasy-XIII.net]

A pair of Square-Enix representatives was in New York to show the company’s holiday lineup and tease some of 2010’s. That tease included a playthrough by them — no touching, journalist — of the E3 build of Final Fantasy XIII. That’s the build our Luke Plunkett would have seen more of had a PlayStation 3 firmware upgrade not ruined things.

Perhaps I could glean no new facts from a June build of a game that will be released in Japan next month. But I could at least form a more informed judgment.

Allow me to provide my Final Fantasy main-game playing resume for context: Never played I-III, started and liked IV on the Game Boy Advance, didn’t play V-IX, played all but the final boss of X, none of XI and about a third of XII. You wouldn’t call me a super-fan.

But I liked XII a lot. I enjoyed the switch from turn-based battles to real-time combat. Even more than that I liked the Gambit System in XII which allowed me to assign tasks to party members, so they would automatically heal or fight in certain ways at certain moments. That system, I felt, surmounted some of the tedium in turn-based role-playing games.

XIII is turn-based, using a battle system similar to IV in that attacks are made available during combat as a meter fills to enable them (translation: you can’t spam attack buttons, but also don’t have to wait to take a turn). But the new game has no Gambit system. Hence my concern that this game wouldn’t be for me. I was concerned that some classic RPG tedium would be back.

The demo that I was shown had the male lead character, Snow, running through part of a city, encountering a few guards and culminating with a boss battle against a phoenix-type creature. I was learning a lot along the way, as the Square-Enix rep played: That I can only control one character in battles, based on whichever one the designers deems best for that moment; that the story is long and intricate, involving a band of lead characters who have branded with the task of destroying their hometown.

I watched a few of the game’s turn-based battles and was impressed with their swiftness. A return to turn-based combat apparently does not mean a return to a slower pace of play. Not only are enemies visible on-screen as you run through the world, but transitions into battle sequences are snap-of-fingers quick.

The Gambit System may not be back, but I was introduced to the Paradigm System, which seems like it could be shorthand for it. The system allows the player to set basic behaviour preferences for their party members. You can set one to medic, for example, though it wasn’t clear to me whether that would be as useful as setting a XII character to automatically heal themselves any time their health drops below 30 per cent of maximum. I’m optimistic about this but need to see more.

I’d read about XIII’s Gestalt mode, though I had misunderstood it to believe it was a purely real-time combat system. XIII allows players to summon epic characters, as is Final Fantasy series tradition. The Gestalt mode lets the player transform the summoned character into a vehicle. Button prompts appear, letting the player manually select from vehicle-based attacks. From what the Square-Enix rep playing the game told me, you’re not freely doing these completely free-form. You’re executing one at a time, somewhat strategically.

Overall, the battle system didn’t seem like the regression I thought it would be and presents an interesting cocktail of concepts. I’m less worried about it.

I was curious about other aspects of XIII that have frustrated me in other role-playing games I’ve played, but little more information was available. Take saving, for example. I was shown a save point, which looked like the standard location-based saving system. No word on whether this game will allow for on-the-fly saving. I couldn’t learn anything more about the game’s inventory system either. In the past I’ve found them a bit messy and overwhelming, but it seems that we’ll have to wait until the XIII’s release in Japan in December.

I didn’t see a whole lot of Final Fantasy XIII, but I did see enough to think better of the game than I had before watching it played. My disappointment that it is so different from XII has all but dissipated. I’m ready to accept it on its merits, if only we can learn more about it.

There are major aspects of the game system that remain a mystery. We”ll find out more next month. The game will be out in North America, Europe and Australia on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on March 9, 2010.

Set 25 years after the original Supreme Commander, Supreme Commander 2 features an extensive campaign mode and online multiplayer, all wrapped up in an engine that sacrifices polygons for performance but still manages to look spectacular.

The release marks one of the first times Square Enix is publishing a Western-developed game in Western regions, and Gas Powered Games Creative Director Chris Taylor couldn’t be more pleased.

“The partnership with Square Enix has been a highlight of my career. I couldn’t be more proud of what the team has accomplished, as the game has continually exceeded all of my expectations throughout its development.”

Supreme Commander 2 will be released on the Xbox 360 and PC in Europe this spring. I’d expect the North American release either at the same time or slightly earlier.

That last bit certainly explains the teaser video that McWhertor posted awhile back, featuring the two criminals running through a Chinese restaurant pursued by gunman and an attack dog, caught on what looks like a grainy surveillance camera. IO Interactive is looking to “deliver a fresh perspective to the words ‘intensity’ and ‘realism’ in video games”, and if that teaser was less tease, more gameplay, then they might just be on to something.

“Gamers are always looking for something new and that is exactly what they are going to get with Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days,” said Niels Jorgensen, general manager of IO Interactive. “A special thanks to gamers worldwide for their feedback. They are certainly in for a shock as we, with immense pride, welcome back our two dear, violent and somewhat unfortunate friends.”

Dog Days will feature the world’s most dysfunctional couple as they journey through the seedy Shanghai underworld. The original teaser vid plus a new one are now up at http://www.kaneandlynch.com, with screenshots listed as coming soon. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is slated for a 2010 release on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 under the Eidos label.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Square boss Yoichi “Imperial Hot” Wada has said that in the future, post-FFXIII world, Square games will be much more timely when making the jump from Japan to the West.

“For the last three years, we have worked very hard to close the gap between Japanese release timing and North American and European release timing,” he said. “We tried to go for the global, simultaneous release [of FFXIII] but that was something that was inconceivable, in a sense. But we have been able to close that release window gap to three months. For us, it was a very big step forward.”

A flat world: Ars interviews Square-Enix CEO Yoichi Wada [Ars Technica]

It’ll go on sale on January 9, 2010, and as part of a bundle including Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, will retail for ¥22,000 ($264).

If you expect this to turn up in the US or Europe, you are living in a fantasy land.

The news came today during a keynote speech from Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada at the Montreal Games Summit, where he spoke about how the company is addressing global markets, Develop reports. The purchase of Eidos is apparently playing a big part in the Square Enix’s plans, with the new title marking the first time separate businesses in the company’s empire would be actively collaborating.

The new title “would be the first collaboration between Square Enix and Montreal,” said Wada. “We would like to be able to create a new title that is made by the group as one.”

Unfortunately there is little information available about this new title, and with how quiet Eidos Montreal has been about their other two high-profile titles, I doubt we’ll be seeing leaks any time soon.

Square Enix’s ‘first global game’ made in Montreal [Develop]