I would like to put a simple translation I made of the talk show that happened during the Final Fantasy 25th event in Japan. It's mostly bullet points of the most important things that were said, and some of their conversations! I know that it would be translated and posted, but I also know that it would take some time... ^^
 
This is not a perfect translation. So please don't hold it against me if I have mistranslated something...
Ok let's start:
 
Server and Engine
 
    The lighting system is very advanced and allows for complex lighting effects, not only during the day but at night and in dungeons as well.
    It was very challenging to port FFXIV:ARR to the PS3 due to low memory issues, but they did their best to optimize it the best way possible.
    Load times and character movements are real time now, and the responsiveness of the game to the player’s actions has been improved a lot.
    Multi Data centers: At the moment, there is only one data center in Japan, and all players are connected to it. Now they are making more data centers around the world to improve the server response. Players will still be able to play with everyone regardless of regions. This is just for the convenience of players not in Japan.
    More flexible world transfers
    Addition of communication support function
    The engine can tolerate the new PvP design (It’s not forcefully done)
    The servers can handle more players in one place as compared to before (was 400-500 players at a time, now around 1000). And for the mobs, it could handle 600mobs at a time and now it’s up to 2000. This will greatly affect the player’s experience, so they’re really happy about it.
 
 
Quests and Main quests
 
    A great number of quests have been added. The aim of these quests is to level, explore the world, story progression among other things.
 
 
Host: These quests are all good for your first class/ job, but what about your second and third? What if you ran out of quests?
Yoshi-p: Of course we are going to provide a large number of quests. But beside that we will keep on adding more, and there are other still unannounced contents, and others to be enjoyed with the public, such as NM’s, they are all being prepared. I hope that players don’t stay in one place doing the same things, but would rather they try many different contents and level in the process.
Host: But what about people who are already level 50?
Yoshi-p: They can look forward to the high level content we announced, and there are still some unannounced contents, such as raids, and new classes, chocobo raising, and other stuff. The amount of instanced dungeons is going to increase. There is going to be a level limit, but since we are adding level sync, which will allow level 50 players to go down to the required level of the content, players can group up with new players and do content together. And of course many high level dungeons are going to be added so please look forward to them.
 
    For the main quests; it’s the same world but different. Since it’s now going through the 7th Umbral Era, and with the new game system, these have to be reflected in the game, and as a result it became completely different.
    Parley has been taken out of the main quests (not sure about this one).
    The general progression of main quests is, you do a couple of quests then fight a strong boss to be able to continue with your story. This will add a true sense of progression of RPG games. And with level sync this is going to improve the experience for all the players. Unlike currently in the game when people challenge the “weak” ifrit, it’s as if watching a cutscene and there is no actuall fight.
    A quest progression system has been added. And there is an “objectives” tab to make it easier to track you progression through these quests.
 
 
Sound and Music
 
    Quest cutscenes will have Japanese VO not only English. The players will be able to change the audio language to any of the languages. The languages supported are Japanese, English, French and German.
    The way music plays is going to change.
 
 
Battle
 
    The first thing you’re going to notice when you try out the battle system is the tempo, and how speedy it got.
    Handling TP is going to change. In the current version the player had to fight to generate TP, but it changed to be similar to MP where you start the battle with full TP. The main reason to make it that way was due to PvP.
    We have 3 types of actions: abilities, weapon skills, and magic. Currently abilities have a recast timer on them, while weapon skills and magic have TP and MP requirements respectively along with an added recast timer. However, in FFXIV:ARR the abilities will stay the same, while the weapon skills and magic will only require TP or MP. Obviously this will affect the speed of battle greatly.
    Combos as well have been modified. Since in PvP it is going to be very difficult with the positioning requirements, players will feel like they are being punished for doing combos. So only the first move will require positioning (not sure about magic) while the rest of the combo will only require TP/ MP to be executed.
    The parameters and stats and their formulas have been changed to be much simpler to understand. But still it would be very interesting so please look forward to it.
 
 
Fan Questions
 
Host: How will we fight together with our chocobo’s?
Yoshi-p: You call it, a menu appears, select “fight together”. That’s it.
Host: what about colors?
Yoshi-p: We are thinking about various things.
Host: We can jump now! But what about flying and swimming?
Yoshi-p: I am more towards flying at the moment. Since it’s a Final Fantasy, and having airships and going to the skies sounds like a really nice idea to me. But this is all too soon to talk about.
Host: Other than meteor what can we expect as limit breaks?
Yoshi-p: Tifa’s… Tifa’s… Tifa’s…
Host: Will Excalibur and Masamune appear as weapons?
Yoshi-p: Of course I’m thinking of addind Excalibur when the time is right, but Masamune will come when the Samurai or Ninja jobs are introduced to the game.
 
Arcanist and Summoner
 
It’s the same as what I posted in the relevant thread regarding both of them, but I’ll just add the little comments and teases they made.
 
    Please look forward to the auto-attack motion. (Throws the book?)
    The players will be able to craft the books and they will have recipes. The class that crafts them is of course… can’t tell right now.
    Summoners will not have carbuncle as a pet, but they’ll be using the primals as their source of power. However, not the primals themselves but they’ll use only a part of a primals strength. “A pet that the primals power dwells in” are Matsui’s exact words if I wasn’t mistaken.
    The summoners will be able to borrow the power of 4 primals (this is what is planned till now, and could be expanded later on). The ones that are confirmed right now are Ifrit, and Garuda.

Dengeki interview summary
Here's the summary of the Dengeki interview. As always, no guarantees for translation correctness. Blue are my comments, rest was present in the interview. I left out some fluff, leaving only the bare points, maybe Rein will want to translate it fully. Yoshida-san talked a lot about their reasons for everything they are doing and he's being honest and straightforward about it, which I like.

Alpha
Alpha -> Wipe -> Beta, to not risk dragging any data bugs from alpha to beta
alpha is currently the minimal niveau they want to have
Once again a reminder from YoshiP: "alpha" = "stress test", not "play the game"
Global alpha will start end of the month
Plans are to get a lot of people in, if login counts drop, more will be invited. Aiming for a login rate of 60% of invited players.
PR will be parallel to alpha, for example promoting characters not usable in alpha [I'm guessing he means new races?]

Beta
Beta content packaging started
Beta will be next year
Controller UI will become available
Phase 1 will once again be a (closed) stress test
in Phase 2 they will increase the amount of participants
Phase 3 will make our saved data available
All races will be present in the beta version
Not all animations will be present for all races, so dummy animations will be used (for example, miqo'te ears not visible on a helm)

story of ARR
something similar to 4 heroes of light of FFI
end of era trailer has a continuation -> opening of ARR
ARR is set 5 years after end of 1.0, why world has recovered so fast is related to what happened in the last moments between Louisiox and Bahamut. Will be the main of the 3 storylines in ARR until the first expansion and will explain about the Allag Empire, Dalamud, why Bahamut was sealed and what became of Louisiox.

2 other storylines:
-> conflict with Garlemard
first goal of the empire is to stop the beast tribes
conquest is only secondary
-> fight against the primals
aether energy is same as FFVII lifestream: use (summoning) damages planet, needs to be stopped

story will be episodic
first ep: conclusion of the 7th umbral era catastrophe (cap still lv50)
"Ishgard", "Recovery of Ala Mhigo", and "The Garlean Empire" used as examples for new story episodes/expansions
old 1.0 story got scrapped, however the essence is still there.

FATE (Full Active Time Event)
every participant gets a reward
start will be announced in the field
event flow:
-> get close to the area
-> party is autoformed + level synched
-> fulfill objective
-> reward based on damage and participation time
no timers to be able to participate again

Housing
S-sized land = S-sized house
no expansions; if you want a bigger piece of land, you have to buy it (full price)
if you don't need land, you can sell it to the NPC
moving to another patch of land is also possible
a newly bought house comes without any furniture
apparently, in L-size houses you can distribute the space inside to make own rooms. [Not sure I got that correctly]

Cities
LL & Ul'dah won't be shown a little longer. Both maps and the cities were changed.
"Universal design": all DoW Guilds are marked red, no matter the city
What was changed was mostly the ways between point of interest, making them shorter.
In case of LL, floor textures were changed to better distinguish between lower and upper floors.
Ul'dah's gate MIGHT be able to open now.

PS3 Version
PS3 Beta after PC Beta enters phase 3
Aiming for about 40 players visible on screen
additional to that, 4 M-Sized or 1 L-sized monster
since there will be LOD, you won't get the impression there are only 40 models visible on screen.
PS3 version coming along nicely
More about the PS3 version at the beginning of 2013

Misc
You won't be able to use macros from 1.0
Safe to delete the old client, but don't throw away you registration codes! [probably needed to DL ARR CE?]
Both PS3 preorder and collector's edition will have a bonus
All music in alpha is by SOKEN
Dev team size is currently 9 times the size of the original team
Bahamut design comes from Hiroyuki Nagamine, base by Akihiko Yoshida. Naoki Yoshida requested for Bahamut to be less mechanic and more leaned towards classic design, so that everyone seeing him would instantly recognize him.
He thought about voicing the NPCs too, but decided against it to favor faster update cycles. Voicing 4 languages takes too long, and should new languages be added, it would take even longer.