NEW YORK — "Final Fantasy" games usually keep a thorough gamer busy for more than 50 hours. So it was a challenge Monday morning not just for GameFile to brave the bluster of Manhattan on a minus-9-windchill day, but to somehow soak in the details of nine games from the makers of "Final Fantasy" — nearly all of them epics — in just 60 minutes.

We actually needed 70 ... and would have been better off if we were right-handed and prepared for the most daunting game a company has demonstrated to the press in a long time.

Two representatives from Square Enix offered coffee and juice and showed trailers for a battery of upcoming games. Action sequences appeared from "Final Fantasy Tactics A2" (Nintendo DS), "Final Fantasy IV" (DS), "Chocobo's Dungeon" (Wii), "Infinite Undiscovery" (Xbox 360), "The Last Remnant" (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3) and "Star Ocean 4" (no platform announced), most of them in Japanese and pushing the graphics on their respective platforms. All featured the standard cocktail of swords, magic and high-tech gizmos that typify the Square Enix line. [Update: Square Enix reps have clarified that those trailers represent games that were shown at last year's Tokyo Game Show and are not all announced for U.S. release, though that status is subject to change.]

The trailer reel consisted of every epic game Square Enix is promising for the next year except "Final Fantasy XIII," which, then again, isn't actually planned for 2008 — it's just rumored to be coming out sometime this year, and maybe in Japan.

Ten minutes spent watching trailers (we watched the short version of "Star Ocean 4") left a healthy amount of time for three hand-held games all slated for early 2008, each pushing its platform and one pushing GameFile itself to the limit.

There was "Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core," a PlayStation Portable prequel to the hit '90s role-playing game "Final Fantasy VII," and a game that has been said to look better than many PlayStation 2 games. It does. It's also an action game, instead of a turn-based affair like its predecessor, and may be the first game to feature three constantly spinning slot-machine reels in the corner, a so-called Digital Mind Wave system that occasionally moves to the center of the screen and allows the player to strike with supercharged attacks.

There was "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates," a follow-up to one of the most technologically demanding games of the previous era of consoles, the GameCube's "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles." The GameCube title was meant to be played by four players, each using a Game Boy Advance and a special link cable wired to a single GameCube. Each player would control one character in an adventure set in a series of beautifully rendered dungeons and caves. But many people didn't have all the gear, nor the patience to keep up with a group of three other players, despite a system that made players' characters sickly if they wandered from the other three.

The new game skips wires and skips a GameCube, linking four DS systems together over short-range wireless (there's no co-op online play). Two MTV employees and two Square Enix employees banded together, with GameFile sporting rabbit ears, a girlish disposition and a crossbow. Cooperative play turned into something else upon the discovery that friendly fire was active. Firing the crossbow at allies only knocked a point off an ally's health but still proved fun enough to distract from the dungeon-crawling goals. Misbehaving players could be punished by being hoisted into the air, but revenge came with just a few taps of the jump button, as the hoisted character kicked the hoister in the head. This game is as much a test of camaraderie as any cross-country trip with the whole family. It also appears to be the first DS game made for a full-size, four-player cooperative adventure.

The wildest experience of all — and the most daunting — was "The World Ends With You," an eccentric game that sets the standard "Final Fantasy"-style shenanigans in modern Tokyo, in the Shibuya district, which is akin to Manhattan's Times Square. Magic potions are replaced with burgers and ramen noodles. The clothes are modern. The battle text is in graffiti. The attitude is spunkier then the norm. Victory in battle elicits the phrase "noise erased." The plot? It all starts when the game's hero wakes up in Tokyo without a memory but with a text message that tells him to start taking "missions."

The craziest part? "The World Ends With You" requires the kind of modern-day mutant concentration everyone thought they would need when they first saw the two-screen DS unveiled a few years ago. At last, here is a game that requires the player to control a character on the top screen and one on the bottom screen, the top one with the DS' buttons, the bottom one with the DS' stylus — all while both characters are being attacked by sharks and jellyfish that prowl the streets of Tokyo. That's how the game's battles work, and one Square Enix rep in attendance said that it's only hard at first. After a little bit of time, it becomes natural.

Picture this set of challenges for a single battle: The sharks and jellyfish are attacking. The lower-DS-screen character is armed with a few attacks of his own, selected from a much larger armory. Tapping the screen makes him shoot fireballs; slicing at the screen launches spikes of ice. The top-screen character is under attack at the same time. That character's fighting moves are triggered with button presses on the DS directional pad, a series of taps that move a cursor through a small field of playing-card icons. Highlighting the best sequences of cards generates better attacks. Both the bottom and top screens require the player's viewing attention. The player could set the DS to control the top-screen action for them, but wouldn't that be against this game's future-is-now experience? One hitch in the overall enthusiasm for this game might be the lefty's dilemma.

Other DS games that require more modest control of buttons and stylus map the same commands to the four buttons on the right side of the DS as are mapped to the D-pad, letting lefties use the right-side buttons. "The World Ends With You" doesn't appear to have that option. A Square Enix rep couldn't confirm, but she said that she's a southpaw too and had been told by the game's producer to try holding the system upside down. She believes he was joking.

Was there more? Sure there was. A Wii game called "Dragon Quest Swords" offers a remote-only one-handed slash-fest against little dragons and slime-creatures. The adventure game sets players on a path viewed in first-person, with movement controlled just by pressing forward and back on the remote's directional pad. The meat of the game is in the remote-swinging. Sword slashes slice the enemies who get in the player's path; a poke of the remote is a stab of the sword; and a press of a button on the remote turns the Wii cursor into a moveable shield. The game is all about arm movement, the kind of Wii game that furniture should be scared of.

Is that enough gaming for 70 minutes? Square Enix comes to New York to show titles about once a year. They made it count and helped demonstrate that over in Japan, the company's studios are pushing gaming machines, new and old, to do things some of us may not even have been born yet to do. That's progress.

More from the world of video games:

A blue-ribbon panel helped the Multiplayer blog select the greatest horse in video game history. Now comes February's grand quest: to name the best canine (dogs and wolves are fair game). The nominations have been announced, with write-in suggestions encouraged. A final selection will be announced at the end of the month.

Why did a massively multiplayer Marvel Comics Xbox 360 game just get canceled by Microsoft? What's the future of "Halo" and "Mass Effect"? Those and more issues were discussed in a sweeping interview between MTV Multiplayer and Microsoft's head of internal game publishing, Shane Kim, in a sweeping interview that is part of our coverage of last week's DICE gaming summit in Las Vegas.

[This story was originally published at 8:00 pm E.T. on 2.12.2008]

For all that and more, check out Multiplayer.MTV.