CHIBA CITY, Japan--Square Enix showed off a new trailer for Fantasy Earth: The Ring of Dominion, which hasn't had too many details released so far. That, unfortunately, didn't change at PlayStation Party 2005. The company's trailer featured an impressive, extended version of the promotional footage shown last year, where a heroine was seen fighting against enemies with her teammates, much like in a console role-playing game. The new trailer added some brief footage of updated in-game screens, but not enough to indicate specific details.

　　To update the original announcement with additional new information: Fantasy Earth will be a massively multiplayer game for the PC that's an action RPG with strategy elements. Although the game will have its share of goblins and other monsters from which to earn money and level up, its core content will be realm-versus-realm battles between player characters. Players can associate themselves with one of five different countries in the game, and they can fight to take down one another's fortresses in battle. Up to 100 players can participate in a battle, divided into 50 players on each side. One of the key points in the game is to collect more crystals than your enemies, which will be required to execute powerful skills that are advantageous in battle. The crystals can also be used to create new fortresses.

　　Similar to other Square Enix games, players can summon monsters in Fantasy Earth. But what's unique in Fantasy Earth is that the player's character will transform into a monster, rather than an articificial intelligence-controlled or player-controlled character. Five summoned monsters have been announced so far: a dragon, which can fly and breath powerful flames; a giant, which is slow but good for taking down fortresses; a lace, which can give various status effects to players; a horse-riding knight, who is both powerful and fast; and a chimera, an artificial life-form with numerous attacks.

　　While Square Enix plans to release the game within the year, it's still tinkering around with some of the game's fundamental systems. The company just announced before the Square Enix party that it's changing the structure of the player character's job classes. Up until now, there were seven classes announced for the game, which were warrior, berserker, shadow walker, hunter, sorcerer, priest, and rune blade. Those have been simplified into three classes: warrior, scout, and sorcerer. This doesn't necessarily mean that players will have less to do, since characteristics of the deleted classes have been merged into the remaining ones. It seems as though players will be able to give their characters unique traits by selecting the available skills from the merged classes.

　　Warriors are strong at direct hand-to-hand combat, and they possess strong defensive and attacking powers. Scouts specialize in long-distance attacks via archery, as well as ambush attacks using short swords. Arrows aren't powerful, but they're said to be useful in strategic attacks. Sorcerers can use powerful magic attacks and spells that can hinder enemy movements. However, they require casting time.

　　Square Enix hasn't announced any plans for an English launch yet, but considering the game will only let players use English text for their character names, it seems obvious the company is considering a release of the game outside of Japan.