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!]

Okay, let's get this out of the way right up front: Downloading what you think is a ROM of the Japanese release of Dragon Quest IX, days before it even comes out, is not cool. It turns out that it will probably also end up being hazardous to your DS.

DS Scene reports that a file going around, labeled "Dragon Quest IX JPN DSi Enhanced NDS iND," is actually not Dragon Quest IX at all, but rather a malicious program that can overwrite a DS's firmware and render systems unusable. The program is disguised as a hentai slideshow called "DS Owata," which is itself disguised as Dragon Quest IX.

Our advice in this case is to do your very best not to be a pirate and just buy the thing when you can. Square Enix booby-traps its legitimate games against piracy anyway.

It's a brand! Square Enix today welcomed (tentatively named) Square Enix Europe into the world; an "efficient and powerful" newborn division that looks just like Eidos' worldwide studios combined with various European sales and marketing personnel from existing Square Enix and Eidos lineages. Current Eidos CEO Phil Rogers has been selected to raise the baby branch, which replaces Eidos as a publishing label, though the Eidos brand will live on through its studios' credits. Additionally, Eidos' North American marketing, sales and distribution operations have been delegated to the territory's Square Enix office, which is led by John Yamamoto.

Of course, the icky part of Edios' arranged marriage to Square Enix and the subsequent birth of Square Enix Europe is the anticipation of an unknown number of layoffs. "Unfortunately we are expecting some jobs to be impacted directly by this in both Europe and North America," an Eidos spokesperson confirmed. "We are hoping to minimize this wherever possible and offer support and advice to any employees directly affected."

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."

Sure, Europe still has some slight delay when getting Square Enix PSP titles, when compared to the US, but at least when they arrive, they come with extra goodies. Crisis Core had a bonus art book and now Dissidia will be getting the collector's edition treatment.

This special edition will include a regular boxed copy of the game inside clamshell packaging, as shown in the image to the right. Also in the box will be a "Best Selection Soundtrack Mini-CD," with specially chosen tracks from the game and liner notes by the composer.

There will also be a 48-page hardback artbook, similar to the Crisis Core one, and a Brady Games Official Miniguide and two lithograph prints. Not a bad package, overall, but we're still waiting for the announcement of the European release of the limited edition Dissidia PSP-3000. It is coming, right Square Enix?

"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.

Square Enix's Robotron-ish shooter Project Cube has been bestowed its release name: Death By Cube. A European trademark noted by Siliconera a couple days ago had the site speculating that it was the final name, but Square Enix confirmed that to be the case today.

Squenix doesn't currently have any public assets to go with the game, so the best we can do is show you the (admittedly less than ideal) video of Project Cube after the break.

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.

Yes, another countdown. Don't worry, we hate them as much as you do, but Japanese publishers seem to love them. This time it's Square Enix's turn to announce a new (or, knowing Square Enix, old) game through the medium of time itself. The countdown takes place on a blank canvas with a landscape sketch taking shape in the bottom hand corner, along with the number four. We imagine this will expand to fill the page as the countdown makes its way to zero, which will occur on July 6.

There's also some very faint music, which will probably get louder as the countdown proceeds. It sounds like an old-school MIDI to us, though we, along with our pals Shazam and Midomi, don't recognize it. It could be a remake, but at this point there's not much to go on. Hopefully we'll find out more when the countdown finishes, but nowadays we can't even be certain about that ...

[Thanks, Sean]

There's a decent chance you've never heard of the Square Enix DS title, Nanashi no Game (roughly: The Game with No Name), as it was never released outside of Japan. Essentially, it's The Ring in video game form. In the original Nanashi no Game, the player was introduced to a cursed role-playing game that killed its players within seven days if they failed to complete it. Thus, the game was split into sections of first-person exploration in 3D and sections that were styled after 8-bit role-playing games of yore (Dragon Quest, most notably).

Now, a year later, Square Enix is getting ready to unleash the sequel, Nanashi no Game Me (The Game with No Name: The Eye), which includes not only a cursed RPG, but a cursed platformer as well (who's developing these cursed games, anyway?). You can check out a trailer for the game (courtesy of Famitsu) above. You can also find some more info on the game at Siliconera. We have no idea if the sequel will make its way out of Japan, but we definitely hope so.

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?

Square Enix has released some brand new DLC for its saccharine puzzler, Yosumin Live. Called "Yosumin Adventure," the content has players traveling "the world to recover the pieces of a beautiful stained-glass window." That's just precious, which is in keeping with the game's already colorful presentation. According to Siliconera, the content adds a full 180 stages to the game. At only 80 ($1), we'd say it's a steal for Yosumin fans.

Add "Yosumin Adventure" to your Xbox 360 download queue.

[Via Siliconera]