Final Fantasy XIII News Round Up

A couple of tidbits of Final Fantasy XIII news have bubbled up over the last couple of days, so here at SPOnG we thought we'd best break it down for you.

First up, Japan will get a demo of the game in March next year. This comes from an announcement at the DSK3713 fan event in Tokyo. Yes, we know, that's crazy-early for a demo announcement. But it won't be your standard PSN demo release. It will be part of the Blu-ray release of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete, a director's cut of the 2005 animated movie. There's no word yet on whether we'll see that in other regions.

Secondly, we have a release date for FFXIII... Sorry, did we say 'date'? We meant 'year'. Square has confirmed that, in Japan at least, the game will be released in late 2009. Cheers Square!

Thirdly, again at DSK3713, Square has left no doubt whatsoever that the PS3 is the lead platform for the game. "We haven't changed the direction of the development. We're making the PS3 version first, and then porting to the 360 later... I'm telling them to not think about the Xbox 360 right now", director Motomu Toriyama said of his team.

Why? They don't even have dev kits for the 360 version yet. "We can think about it after the development kits arrive", he said. Toriyama also stressed that the fact FFXIII will be multi-platform won't negatively impact the PS3 version. "We aren't going to change any specifications (of FFXIII) because of the multi-platform announcement", he said.

It has also emerged from a Microsoft exhibition in Taipei that, while it still won't be released on the 360 in Japan, FFXIII will edge a little closer to the territory with a Taiwanese release. Both regions are NTSC, so Japanese 360 owners should be able to import it. Whether it will do them much good is up for grabs, since it apparently remains undecided which localised version will appear in the region. SPOnG somehow doubts it'll be a specially localised Taiwanese version, however...

^{Sources: Wired, Gamespot, Kotaku}