Final Fantasy XIII might be arriving sooner than you expected

If you haven't heard, Square Enix is developing this small game called Final Fantasy XIII. Some weeks ago the Japanese demo of said game was spotted out in the wild and soon after tons of media of the demo surfaced, including a screenshot of the demo's end screen, which effectively put the game's Japanese release at Winter 2009, some guessing that it would land in December.

Considering Square Enix's track record with localization for the North American market and the subsequent release in the PAL regions, odds were that NTSC guys would get their game sometime summer 2010, and PAL would get theirs for Christmas 2010. And these estimates didn't even factor in the time it would take them to get it in releasing order for Xbox 360.

Well, now some good news has surfaced from an interview by VideoGamer.com with Yoshinori Kitase, the producer of the game, who they spoke to in London.

Quote: Obviously we would like to release it over here as soon as possible. Traditionally the Final Fantasy numbered series, it takes about half a year between the release in Japan and the release in North America, and another half a year before it's released in Europe. But we would like to minimise this, this time. For example we have already started recording English voices, and also the text localisation has been in progress, too. Normally we complete the Japanese version first, then move on to the US and EU versions, but this time there are some tasks that are happening simultaneously. So this time we're hoping to release sooner than a year later than the Japanese release.

In the same interview (but a different news story), Kitase also revealed that some of the engine work is also being done simultaneously.

Quote: When it comes to the basic engine it's likely we are going to keep them on the go simultaneously. But the finishing touches, the details, the PS3 version will be completed first, then we will move on to 360.

And there you have it. If the localization time is shortened and the development of the 360 version will not have to wait for the PS3 version to be finished (like was reported back when FF13 was first announced for 360), the game just might be released in both US and Europe sooner than people are prepared for.

Oh, and if you didn't know, there has been some new stuff in the official Japanese FF13 site as well, mainly some wallpapers (click the thumb to see a part of one of those) and some info about battle system I guess. Not like I read Japanese.

Posted in Gaming by Kilu on May 05th 2009 at 7:11pm 0 Comments