Square Enix continues its assault on the Virtual Console in Japan with the third installment in the Final Fantasy series. Game Watch is reporting FInal Fantasy III will be available on the Virtual Console for 500 Wii Points some time this month. We'd be super excited about this, if not for the DS remake that had already released, which gave those of us in the West our first taste of this game. Would you prefer to play the original instead?

[Thanks, Justin!]

As expected, Square Enix is continuing its roll-out of Final Fantasy classics on the PlayStation Network. In addition to Final Fantasy VII and the original Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy II can now be found on the Japanese PlayStation Store. Just like before, this archived re-release is based on the PS1 version of the game and can be played on both the PS3 and PSP.

At the rate that Square Enix has been releasing these games onto the PSN, we can expect the first nine Final Fantasy games as downloads before year's end. We wonder how long it'll take for Square Enix USA to announce localized versions of these downloads ...

Square Enix's totally mysterious teaser site has revealed -- surprise! -- Four Warriors of Light: Final Fantasy Gaiden, only a few days after Jump revealed it. The site offers a bit more detail about the game than we knew -- most importantly, it confirms that the Four Warriors of Light, described as a "newly retold classic," is designed for play by up to four people.

Like the last couple of Final Fantasy remakes on DS, Four Warriors of Light is being developed by Matrix Software. It features a new implementation of the standard Final Fantasy "job system," called the Crown System, which lets players switch jobs whenever desired. That sounds like the Dress Sphere system from the maligned Final Fantasy X-2.

A statement from producer Tomoya Asano on the site, as translated by Andriasang, indicates the team's hope to deliver a game with "the charms of the classic RPG era before RPGs became JRPGs."

"Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord may have a name that's similar to predecessor My Life as a King," Andriasang writes, "but the two games are nothing alike." So much for the dream of running an evil town full of evil adventurers.

Instead, Andriasang describes the WiiWare game as a unique variation of tower defense. As heroes storm your tower, you delay their progress by adding floors to the structure and filling them with monsters. The strategy comes not only from managing your resources enough to build as many floors as you can, but also in placing things so that there isn't too much stuff on one floor. If there is, the heroes can just skip over a floor!

See a video of the game in action after the break.

For once, a Japanese publisher has managed to create a teaser site without having the identity of the new game revealed by Famitsu scans before the official unveiling. Because Jump scans revealed it first.

The Jump scan shows the same dragon-riding artwork found on the teaser site, with two more characters than the site currently shows, revealing a party of four. Final Fantasy Gaiden: The Four Warriors of Light (not related to the Game Boy Final Fantasy Adventure, known in Japan as Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden) is an original turn-based Final Fantasy RPG for DS, in the same style as the recent Final Fantasy DS remakes.

The scan refers to a "four-person party adventure," but we can't tell if that means multiplayer or if it's just a reference to parties controlled by a single player. According to IGN, the main character is a boy who must rescue a princess from a witch.

The battle system is a familiar turn-based, menu-driven system, with what appears to be the addition of a sort of action points: each character's status includes a certain number of yellow dots, and each action seems to have a dot next to it, indicating a cost. Final Fantasy Gaiden will be out this fall in Japan, and we wouldn't be too surprised to see it in North America the following summer for $40.

We know how much you're looking forward to the second installment in the trilogy of mini-expansions for Final Fantasy XI, which is ... wait, it is XI, right? Or -- hold on, is it XII? Which one had the monkey-tail guy in it? That one wasn't online, we don't think. Gunblade was VIII, monkey-tail was IX, whiny athlete was X -- okay, it's definitely XI. What was XII, then? Did XII even come out?

Anywho, the second mini-expansion, titled A Moogle Kupo d'Etat – Evil in Small Doses, is set to drop at the end of this month, but ultra-anticipatory fans can pre-purchase the game starting July 5 for $9.99. You'll need the Rise of the Zilart explansion to play it, and your character's main job level will need to be at least 10 to access the new content. Also, we -- hot bunny-ears girl! Whew, man. That was going to bother us all day.

Square Enix fans can look forward to enjoying more Final Fantasy classics on the PS3/PSP in the future. The very first Final Fantasy game has been re-released as a PSN downloadable in Japan, and it looks as though many more are to come. This digital download isn't a PSN version of the PSP enhanced Final Fantasy. Rather, it's a downloadable version of the PSone remake. Siliconera notes that the PSone game includes FMV cinemas and an art gallery, but misses features found in the later GBA/PSP versions.

Considering all of the classic Final Fantasy games (minus III) were eventually ported on PSone, chances are good that PSN will play home to a very comprehensive library of Final Fantasy games. Who doesn't want to play Final Fantasy VI again?

No wonder Square Enix loves to make spin-offs of Final Fantasy VII -- you people can't stop buying it! The PSN re-release of Final Fantasy VII has been downloaded over 100,000 times in two weeks, making it the fastest-selling PS1 download on the PSN so far (and likely, for all time). If a simple digital re-release can garner these kinds of sales figures, imagine what a proper remake could do.

While touting the "power and interoperability built into the PlayStation brand," Sony also officially announced additional PS1 games for release later this summer: Wild Arms 2, Mobile Light Force and Spec Ops: Stealth Patrol. It's unlikely any of these games will even come close to what Final Fantasy VII was able to achieve.

Bonus! Original PS3 Final Fantasy VII "tech demo" after the break.
Super Bonus! Random and miscellaneous PSN stats after the break as well.

Considering the game's been announced for a little over two weeks but is set to drop in 2010, we expect news for Final Fantasy XIV to fly fast and furious in the months leading up to its release. Today, for instance, we've received rumors claiming that the beta process for the game will begin as early as September, spawned by a recently uploaded Help Wanted sign on Square Enix's site which requests the aid of game testers and game masters.

The employment offering doesn't actually mention FFXIV, though -- it only asks that applicants be well versed in FFXI, which led some fans to speculate that most of the FFXI support team will be shifted to XIV. The GM positions are scheduled to start mid-September -- a potential start date for the speculated beta. Also lending credence is the fact that the FFXIV dev team claims to have been working on the game for five years, and wants it to have a longer beta period than XI's, which was only four months.

We're smelling a lot of "if" coming off this rumor, but our sister site Massively (which knows more about MMOs than anyone ever) thinks it carries some weight. We'll adhere to its wise, wise judgment.

This week, Japanese gamers will be able to download the new multiplayer Pokemon brawler (which is such a great idea!), but they'll have to pay for it. We admit to gasping a bit when we saw the 1,500-point price tag on Ransen! Pokemon Scramble, but we suspect we'll be spending that many of our American-style Wii Points soon enough. Pokemon Scramble is joined on WiiWare by a tambourine-based music game, and a cute-looking puzzle game about rotating objects to allow little creatures to move into a goal.

On the Virtual Console, Square Enix delivers the second Final Fantasy game in as many months. Final Fantasy II was designed by Akitoshi Kawazu, who we just happen to have spoken to at E3! The other VC game is Wonder Momo, a cutesy side-scrolling brawler from Namco that presents itself as a stage play. We're a little embarrassed about liking it.

Virtual Console

• Final Fantasy II (Famicom, 1 player, 500 Wii Points)
• Wonder Momo (Arcade, 1 player, 800 Wii Points)

WiiWare

• Fantagic Tambourine (1 player, 800 Wii Points)
• Anata ga Mawashite Sukuu Puzzle Mochi Mochi Q (1 player, 800 Wii Points)
• Melee! Pokemon Scramble (1-4 players, 1,500 Wii Points)

Considering the impressive demo of Final Fantasy XIII running on Xbox 360 shown off at the Microsoft presser during E3, we were shocked to find out recently that the build being demoed was actually less than six months old. The game's producer Yoshinori Kitase told Giant Bomb during E3 that, "Up to the trial demo version that was released in Japan, [the game] was PS3-only in terms of development."

He explains further, saying, "The Xbox 360 version is definitely following after the PS3 version, but [we] were finally able to come to a point in the PS3 development where some of the staff could take their hands off and start programming the 360 version." Seems as though the claims that the PS3 version would be complete before work on 360 development started were a bit ... overzealous?

Square-Enix' E3 gift of a Final Fantasy VII PSN release was gratefully received, but if you'd asked us what PS1 games we'd like to see next from the publishers, Final Fantasy Tactics would be near the bottom of our list. Somewhere under Chocobo Racing and Ehrgeiz, to be exact. It's not that we dislike the game -- far from it -- it's just that we've played it recently on our PSPs with improved cutscenes and vastly superior translation. The idea of releasing the old "Spoony Bard" version on PSN instead of Final Fantasy VIII or IX doesn't exactly thrill us.

But it looks like that's what will be happening as the ESRB has rated the game for both the PS3 and PSP, meaning we could see it pop on the American PSN store at any moment. As for Europe? Don't bet on it -- the original PS1 version never made it across the Atlantic, so we don't expect the digital version to do so either.

Now that Eidos lives under Square-Enix's crystalline, spire-laden roof, it makes sense that we'd see the two companies collaborating on something. We just didn't think it'd be this soon. Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada recently told Gamasutra that it was "possible" a Square team could work with an Eidos IP "but what's more important is that the two companies, for example, are going to be creating a new IP together."

Not the Lara Croft RPG we were hoping for, but interesting nonetheless.

Fear not Europeans, Square Enix and Sony haven't let you down. Eurogamer reports that Final Fantasy VII will be available on the European store later today, just two days after its release in America. There's no indication of a price, or of why SCEE didn't take advantage of their fancy new blog to let us know that it was coming, but we won't hold that against them. You'll be able to introduce your PS3 and PSP to a classic RPG of yesteryear, today. They won't know what hit them.

This bodes well for future high-profile PS1 title releases to take place simultaneously in Europe and the US. We didn't expect this to happen at all, but we hope SCEE keeps it up.