APRIL FOOLS! Square Enix and Namco Bandai Merge, Announce New RPG

Japanese game publishing giants Square Enix and Namco Bandai announced today that they will be merging to form what the refer to as a “Japanese gaming superpower,” and will be referred to as Squareco Bandix (though the official name remains Square Namco Bandai Enix). The merger comes after both companies have scrambled furiously to acquire smaller publishers including Banpresto and D3 on the Namdai side, and Taito and Eidos on the Squenix side.

Yoichi Wada, former president of Square Enix will be serving as the new giant corporation’s CEO. “We feel that with the combined power of Japan’s two largest third party publishers, we will be able to re-capture the Japanese dominance over the video game development industry.”
This merger comes as both companies have struggled with slowing markets worldwide, and Japanese games beginning to lose their prominence in Western markets.

Along with the merger, the company has announced 3 new games, one of them being a new RPG tentatively titled Tales of Dragon Questia. As the title implies, the game will be cross-over title utilizing characters from both the Tales of series and the Dragon Quest series.

The game is currently in development for Nintendo DS, which, incidentally, is the only platform the new Squareco Bandix will be developing on.

“In all honesty,” spokesman Jerry Nishida said, “every other platform on the market currently sucks huge donkey balls.”

Nishida went on to bash the Wii for being a ‘toy for old, fat people,’ and called the Xbox 360 ‘a steaming pile of garbage.’ When asked about the PlayStation 3, Nishida replied that they had never heard of such a console, and asked if we weren’t talking about an over-priced BluRay player by the same name.

When asked about the future of currently in-development titles like Final Fantasy XIII, newly promoted Vice President of Creative Development, Tetsuya Nomura replied that “all currently developing titles will be immediately ported to the DS.” He refused to take any more questions on the subject.

The fact that this merger has stayed quiet just until its announcement makes this huge news just that much more of a shock. I, for one, don’t know if I can support a mega-corporation like this when they only cater to the lowest common denominator.

What do you guys think?

UPDATE: As most of you likely guessed, this was an April Fool's joke. Square Enix and Namco Bandai have not (as far as I'm aware) announced any plans to merge. ...At least, not with each other.