Lucky for us, FFXIVCore has translated it, you can see the translation after the break.

Update #1: We’ve taken screenshots from the video and posted them in our gallery.

The official Final Fantasy XIV site in Japan has been updated with additional Race information, specifically covering clans.  The clans are listed below for each of the races.  Note that this may not be all of the clans at this point, just the ones that are listed on the website for now.

• Hyur
  • Midlanders
  • Highlanders
• Elezen
  • Foresters
  • Shaders
• Lalafelll
  • Plainsfolk
  • Dunesfolk
• Roegadyn
  • Seewolf
  • Lohengarde
• Miqo’te
  • Seekers of the Sun
  • Keepers of the Moon

If you would like to see the images paired with the names, check out the FFXIV JP website and follow the “New” buttons (Blue tab, then the second link in in the middle with the picture of the Hyur (human).  We’ll report as soon as the NA or EU sites have been updated with this new information.

Update 1: The new song on the JP FFXIV site is available for download here.
Update 2: Included translation of the new Clan information after the break (Continued link).

Images and translations can be found after the break.

Remember when the North American and Japanese Final Fantasy XIV websites were updated back on March 13? Well, the European website has finally caught up, 13 days later. There isn’t anything new on the EU site that we haven’t seen on the NA or JP sites, but Square-Enix is finally sharing the same content between their 3 sites. You’ll find changed in Menu -> Media -> Screenshots and in Menu -> Gameplay -> Disciplines.

Another issue of Dengeki Games magazine hit the bookshelves in Japan today with a short Q&A. ZAM has translated it for your reading pleasure.

Here is a summary of the Q&A:

• The chatlog has battle and chat separated into different tabs (like many modern MMOs).
• All parts of the user interface can be moved around.
• There is an on-screen indicator showing your /check of a party of monsters.  This is useful as it shows a group of monsters strength as a whole instead of a single monster.
• You should be able to switch between any of your classes in the field as long as you are carrying the weapon for the class.  From a previous article, you cannot switch classes in the combat-ready stance (Active Mode), you can only do it while in Passive Mode.
• Beta players will be able to carry over their name to the live servers.  This will only apply to the servers that transition from beta to live.  New servers will be created when the game releases so you can have a shot at getting whatever name you want.  All progress beta players make will be reset when the game goes live.
• PS3 and Windows players will be on the same servers.  As well, if you activated and play primarily on Windows, you could log in just as easily from the PS3 version of the game.
• The beta test will separate Japanese, American, and European players. They do not intend to separate these regions once the game goes live.

As well, Eorzeapedia posted their second part of a older Dengeki magazine.

The latest issues of NVision Magazine and Beckett Massive Online Gamer both have some content and interviews about Final Fantasy XIV and XI. We’re guessing that means other US gaming magazines will be covering Final Fantasy XIV. Once we are able to get our hands on these magazines we’ll report any new information or screenshots we find.

It took a while, but the official Final Fantasy XIV North American website has been updated (no EU update yet). The focus of this update was some new screenshots (which we published in our previous post), along with some more details about the classes/disciplines of FFXIV. There isn’t much new here from the Japanese leaks we saw over the last 3 days. We are working on updating our write-ups on the forums. For now, the images below are from the Armoury/Disciplines system updates.

Update 3/15 9:30am: We’ve Updated the Disciples of War, Disciples of the Land, and Disciples of the Hand posts with the new information. Also, don’t forget to check out our Gallery that has more images from the opening trailer along with more weapon images.

Update 2:20pm: Square has started emailing out notification of the website update.

In-game and new Disciplines images (transparent backgrounds for most):

The information has started to flow. 4Gamer.net has given us a few more images. The collection of the new images are below. The most interesting one shows the game’s user interface. Though, this may have changed quite a bit already, and will probably change more before the game releases. There are also some images from the opening trailer/move for the game (that was shown to people that attended VanaFest). Be sure to check out the other information that came out over the last day.

Update 3/11 8:46am: Here’s an updated song from the Japanese FFXIV Website (right-click and save-as to save to your computer). Sounds like battle music to us.

Update 3:15pm: No official website update yet. The FFXIV Beta website did launch for those with access, but it currently only has a forum available for people to talk on. No alpha client is available for download yet. On a side note ZAM, Eorzeapedia, and FFXIVCore have all done write-ups on all the new discipline information that came from the Famitsu article.

Update 3/12 3:40am: A second Japanese magazine has been released and translated. ZAM is covering a Q&A session done by Dengeki magazine. It’s a fairly lengthy Q&A talking about many different aspects of the game, though it has some overlap from the Famitsu article others have already translated. As well, only the Japanese website has been updated still (as reported yesterday morning), but it’s content seems to be equivalent to what we’ve seen from the magazine translations. We’ll keep an eye out for NA and EU updates still.

Update 1:50pm: Eorzeapedia has done a write-up covering the Famitsu Q&A session along with a breakdown of the user-interface screenshot seen below. As well, FFXIVCore has done their own write-up on the Dengeki Q&A that ZAM already covered. On the official website side of things, there still is no updates for the NA or EU sites.

Rendered and Cut scene images:

FFXIVCore has found some leaked information from Famitsu and Dengeki magazines that people got their hands on early. There is some new information about the battle system, jobs/classes/disciplines details, and other random game information. This new information means that the official websites will be updating soon. We’ll update this post if we find any new information. All new information can be found below.

Update 1: BeyondVanadiel is covering the same leaked information but translated it a little differently. We’ll merge it with the FFXIVCore information if anything is new.

Update 2: Looks like Famitsu (google translate version) has published the information on their website. We’ve updated the image collection below.

Update 3: FFXIVCore has translated the Famitsu article and pieced it together at their site. We’re hoping the official US website updates soon with all of this new information.

Update 4: ZAM has posted their translation of the Famitsu article. It’s probably the most comprehensive translation out of the group.

The North American FAQ for Final Fantasy XIV has been updated to tell us about the promotion code packaged with Final Fantasy XIII. It looks like the PS3 and XBox both have promotion codes but they do different things. The PS3 one version gets you a shot at the FFXIV beta along with an in-game item for FFXIV. The Xbox code gets you some outfits for your Xbox360 Live character. All of the new questions and answers are below.

Update: Joystiq and others are talking about the promotion code included in the FFXIII box. You get 2 things from it. (1) A chance to be selected for the PS3 FFXIV beta and (2) a FFXIV secret in-game item. Seeing that every FFXIII game sold today and over the next few weeks will include this beta access code, and assuming 10% of people fill the form out online, you can still expect 100,000+ people submitting an application for FFXIV beta for the PS3, maybe more. So the odds of being selected for beta testing may be better than the PC version, it still may be slim to get it. But you should still enter if you are planning on playing FFXIV on your PS3. Be sure to read the FAQ entries below as it talks about the submission process.

82 days after Final Fantasy XIII launched in Japan, the game has made its way to the United States, Europe and Australia. March 9th marks the release date for Final Fantasy XIII. Just 2 days after FFXIII leaves Japan, the closed alpha testing for Final Fantasy XIV is set to begin. The time proximity between the release of FFXIII and the alpha test start for FFXIV is rather intriguing to us.

If you’ve read around the internet about FFXIV, you’ll find that a lot of people were (and still are) confused by the announcement of Final Fantasy XIV and how it is planned to be released this year. When FFXIV was announced, Final Fantasy XIII didn’t even have a release date. Once the FFXIII release dates were hammered down, people were still surprised to see FFXIII launching the same year as FFXIV is scheduled to launch. When you take this confusion into account, this makes us believe that the alpha testing for FFXIV could have started a some time ago (maybe two months ago). It would have looked bad and confused people even more if the FFXIV alpha testing had begun before FFXIII launched outside of Japan.

We’re somewhat hopeful that Final Fantasy XIV will launch sooner than later. There was a trend where people were thinking that FFXIV would launch late this year (in December), but it may come to us sooner than that. Once the alpha testing begins, we’ll have a good idea of how close FFXIV is to being ready for everyone to play. Check back with us later this week (Wednesday and Thursday) for any alpha/beta information that we are able to share.