Final Fantasy XIII, Japan 2009, rest of the world April 2010 or later

As was expected and much speculated, even more so after the site launch some days ago, it has now been officially confirmed. FF13 is slated to come out in Japan sometime 2009, and the rest of the world has to wait until April 2010, or later.

That's what Square Enix president Yoichi Wada said in a financial call in Tokyo yesterday, and I guess that's what everyone have been posting about, and will be posting about for the next few days.

I find the "or later" part interesting, to say the least. Since they have said earlier that it will be a simultaneous west release on both consoles, and that they won't even start the XBOX360 conversion until the Japanese PS3 version is ready, it makes me wonder, have they even looked into porting the game yet, and can't estimate the date more accurately, thus the "later" part? Or are they just playing it safe and all doubters will get a surprise when it actually is ready by then?

On the other hand, I don't really buy the part about not starting to develop the X360 version until the PS3 version is ready. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, they probably leave the actual porting to be done after the PS3 goes gold, but I'm sure that a lot of work has been done already to set up the ground for the port. It's also more than likely that the localization will be done by a separate team, and I expect that that work has also begun already.

So, on one hand, it seems like they sure are taking their time, but on the other hand, they probably are doing it the right way, making sure that it's solid when it ships. Though, at this point the quality of Square Enix's X360 work is an unknown. There isn't anything to base any guesses on. You could say that Last Remnant, but no, not really. Last Remnant was done with the Unreal3 Engine, which has been designed to be used on X360. FF13 is done with SE's own Crystal Tools, which, as I said, is an unknown factor right now. Though Crystal Tools also supports PC, so I'm still holding out hope for a PC port.

But all this remains to be seen.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on January 16th 2009 at 7:24am 0 Comments

Final Fantasy XIII site lives

So the Final Fantasy XIII site went live a few days ago. What does that mean for the gamers? Well, nothing really. The actual release date of the game even in Japan is anyone's guess, bringing it to west is just somewhere in the future.
A gentleman called Keeng over at GiantBomb has it right I'm afraid.

Quote: Both versions of the game will launch at the same time in the west. However, Square Enix has said multiple times they won't begin working on the 360 version until the PS3 version is done, for quality assurance purposes. It has, in the past, taken them anywhere from 6 months (FFX) to 2 full years (FFXI) to finish localization on Final Fantasy games. So after we wait out that potentially 6-24 month localization process, we'll have to wait on them to port the game to 360 and THEN FFXIII will be out in the west. Considering that people are suspicious about the Japanese version even making a late 2009 release date, after at least two years of localization and porting on top of development time, we probably won't see FFXIII until Q4 2010 at the earliest. And that's being extremely optimistic. My guess, if Square Enix sticks to its guns about finishing one version before the other and a simultaneous western release, is we'll see the game in summer 2011.

So, yeah. Don't expect it to land here anytime soon.
The site has a bunch of nice pictures of the 3 announced characters with their silly names. Well, nice, if you like Tetsuya Nomura's style. I don't, that much. There's just something about his designs that make them all look so similar to each other that it's a bit creepy. And character biographies (maybe) but since it's in Japanese, my guess is not an educated one.
The music is nice though. It sounds a lot like Hamauzu, which should be expected I guess. It's nice nevertheless.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on January 13th 2009 at 8:57am 1 Comment