In case you haven't heard, the Vice President of Square-Enix and Co-Creator of the Final Fantasy series Hironobu Sakaguchi, has decided to leave Square-Enix to create his own game development studio. This has been the latest action from Sakaguchi ever since the revealing of FFXII... which then was his latest action ever since FF:TSW came out.

The Development Studio is named Mist Walker and unlike the big names like Konami, Square, and all that, they are independant and will not be publishing their games themselves or to a standard company. While this means they can get Square-Enix to publish their games, there is nothing to stop them from having another company to publish their games. A good example of this would be a game company called Treasure, where they worked on Ikaruga (published by Atari), Wario World (published by Nintendo), and Gradius 5 (published by Konami).

It'll be interesting to see if/how this effects the FF series.

I'd love to see what kind of games his studio comes up with. I imagine we won't hear anything from them for a while though. =/

They are working on two RPGs, according to Squarenet.de~

I doubt it'll affect the FF series that greatly, since Sakaguchi's influence has been diminished already anyway. Let's say, it's only one of many influences, and means neither doom nor victory for the series as a whole...

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/08/09/news_6104499.html

Square-Enix seems to be making another big move.

Big move I'd not call it yet. It could be anything, really. Could be a FFXI expansion for all we know. Could be a mobile phone game. Could be anything, really, so calling it a big move is a little early. It's not the first time they get the trademark for some title without telling us what it's for. :P

Yeah, I heard about Mist Walker a while ago. Interestingly enough, Yoshitaka Amano is apprently lending his support to the project as well (although he isn't solely concentrating on Mist Walker though as he is a freelance artist). Could this be the start of a 'back-to-basics' approach for RPGs?

As for Square Enix mobile phone games. all I know apart from FFVII - Before Crisis are ports of old classic Enix games like Actraiser, however, strangely enough Drakengrad is also getting a 'cellular' port. Maybe something from Mist Walker may also follow to phones in the not-to-distant-future?