E3 06: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates Impressions

LOS ANGELES--Today at the Square Enix press conference, Akitoshi Kawazu, the executive producer on the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series, announced two new games in the series for Nintendo systems.

The first of these games is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates for the Nintendo DS. While we only got a snippet of gameplay from the game, we did have some promotional material presented as well. According to the trailer, the game is the "story of the time when the red moon still shone in the night sky, and the people feared the crystals." From there, we were off on a minute-long journey into Ring of Fates.

One of the first things that was confirmed was that the game will feature both a compelling single-player game, as well as support for up to four players simultaneously on the DS multiplayer network. It looks as though there will be multiple character archetypes to choose from again, as in Crystal Chronicles for the GameCube, with each having a distinctive play style. One of the characters that was featured prominently was a young female archer who fired on enemies from afar, but there was a good mixture of spellcasting and melee characters on display as well.

Apart from the characters, it was difficult to get a read on the gameplay, but we did catch a glimpse of a character pushing a bucket, presumably with a crystal in it, so that facet of gameplay from the GameCube original appears to be intact. All of the characters teamed up to take on a crab monster that appeared to take up most of the DS screen, so you'll probably find yourself having to deal with some seriously large enemies while you play through Ring of Fates.

From what we've seen, Ring of Fates is definitely in the action RPG standard mode. We'll have more details on the game as they become available, so stay tuned to GameSpot.