Hey everyone,

Several new Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep and Kingdom Hearts: Coded screenshots have surfaced on the internet. We’ve seen the majority of Dissidia, 358/2 Days and Birth By Sleep screenshots before, however all of the Kingdom Hearts: Coded screenshots are new.

Two of the Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep screenshots are of conversations during cutscenes, however the other two seem to show some kind of in game mini-game. It’s hard to tell what’s happening in the mini-game, but it looks as if Terra has to kill one enemy after another within a certain time limit. The ‘Time Limit‘ ring could be part of the battle system, but it’s more likely to be part of a mini-game.

The Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days screenshots don’t really provide us with anything new, they’re just high quality screenshots of those shown in Shonen Jump earlier this week.

As I said earlier, all of the Kingdom Hearts: Coded screenshots are new. From what I can make out, it looks as if Coded’s in game battle system will use a mobile phone’s arrow and letter keys to create combos. Whilst in a battle, Kingdom Hearts: Coded seems to use a 3D engine; however from the looks of things Coded’s field play is going to be 2D - reminiscent to titles such as Crash Bandicoot.

All of the Dissidia: Final Fantasy screenshots have been seen before, just not in as high quality. One of the more interesting screenshots features the recently announced Onion Knight.

Read the rest of the entry to view the screenshots.

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Hey everyone,

This weeks edition of the Japanese gaming magazine, Jump Weekly featured a page spread on three of the upcoming games in the Kingdom Hearts compilation. The main focus of the article was on Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, though there was a little on Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep and Coded.

The Jump Weekly scan further confirms a vague release date of 2008 for Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. The screenshots featured in the scan reveal a little new information, we know know that at one point or another you’ll get to visit Beast’s Castle; a world featured in Kingdom Hearts II. The new screenshots also reveal a couple of changes to the games original interface, a new special points system now appears in the left hand corner of the screen; and Roxas’ character icon has changed since the last batch of screenshots.

Interestingly, it seems that there is a map on the bottom screen. This suggests that Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days probably won’t intergrate the Nintendo DS’s touch screen in the way that fans had originally hoped. It’s not the end of the world, but it is a shame.

In regard to Birth By Sleep, the release date is still unknown. The same goes for Kingdom Hearts: Coded, the scan also suggests that Kingdom Hearts: Coded will feature a different combo system that will make Sora far more powerful than in previous titles. Though this isn’t confirmed.

Hey everyone,

Famitsu recently interviewed Tetsuya Nomura, the director of the Kingdom Hearts series and character designer for many Final Fantasy titles ranging from Final Fantasy VII to XIII. The interview mainly focused on the DKΣ3713 Party 2008 that was announced earlier this week.

Tetsuya Nomura confirmed that Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep and Sigma Harmonics will all have playable demos at the event, whilst the rest of games featured will be shown in a projection room, presumabley similar to the closed mega theatres at E3 and the Tokyo Game Show.

Nomura went on to say that several of the team working on Final Fantasy Versus XIII have moved over to help work on Final Fantasy XIII, probably due to Square Enix’s known difficulties with the PLAYSTATION 3 hardware, and to speed up the production of the game. So it looks as if we won’t be seeing Final Fantasy Versus XIII until well after the released of Final Fantasy XIII. Nomura made a brief comment on Final Fantasy Agito XIII and Kingdom Hearts: Coded saying that they were still in production.

Finally, Tetsuya Nomura told Famitsu that the long delayed Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete’s release date will be confirmed at DKΣ3713 Party 2008. Considering how long it’s been delayed for, it’s safe to say that the release date will be some time in the near future.

Update: A scan of the interview, taken from Famitsu magazine has surfaced on the internet. The scan can be found below.

Hey everyone,

I’ve managed to find some more details on the three new Kingdom Hearts titles that are in the works, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days will be focusing on Roxas and the year gap between Kingdom Hearts I and II. The trailer showed Roxas fighting other members of Organization XIII in a multiplayer mode, the members that he was shown fighting, and therefore playable characters were Axel, Saix and Xigbar.

Towards the end of the trailer Xemnas was also shown explaining that a 14^th member has joined Organization XIII, she appeared to be a female however her face was hidden due to her hood. Roxas was then shown saying “I will disappear from this world in 151 days.”

The PSP title, Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep will feature Aqua, Terra and Ventus from the Birth By Sleep movie that was shown at the end of Kingdom Hearts II. As speculated Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep will take place quite a long time before Kingdom Hearts I, this raises a lot of issues and questions because Tetsuya Nomura has been noted to say that there may be a connection between Roxas and Ventus.

Kingdom Hearts: Coded will be a mobile title, so the chances are that unless your Japanese you’ll probably never have a chance to play Kingdom Hearts: Coded. Coded will essentially be a digitally created version of Kingdom Hearts, the ‘Coded‘ in titles refers to the fact that the game has a debug mode. Debugging allows you to change pretty much every aspect of the game, for example in the trailer Sora was seen walking through objects. To quote Joystiq, “it’s like playing a Kingdom Hearts fanfic written by a hardcore aficionado of The Matrix”.

Hey everyone,

Today Square Enix released this statement containing logos and information about three new Kingdom Hearts titles.

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days is one of the three new titles, this game will be released on Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, whilst Birth By Sleep will be an exclusive PSP title. I’m unsure of what platform Kingdom Hearts: Coded will be released on, however recent speculation leads me to believe the title will be a mobile phone game.

This is great news for all Kingdom Hearts fans, and considering all three titles are going to be on portable devices it leads me to believe that we may soon be hearing of a console-based Kingdom Hearts 3! So stay tuned!