14 DAY TRIAL // Fans of Japanese role playing games all over the world must be mad. And if they are not yet, they will be as they learn that Final Fantasy XIII, set to be the biggest JRPG released in quite some time in the series that basically defined the term, will only be released in North America, Europe and basically everywhere outside of Japan in 2010.
Square Enix announced that the PlayStation 3 version of Final Fantasy XIII would be arriving in Japan before the end of 2009. The role playing game, which caused a commotion at E3 in 2008 as Microsoft announced that the title would no longer be a PS3 exclusive, is set to re-define the way gamers look at role playing experiences, with a deep and convoluted narrative, breathtaking visual and, hopefully, new and interesting game mechanics.
The reason for the delay to 2010 for the international markets is basically Microsoft and its move to bring the game to its Xbox 360 platform. Yoichi Wada, the president of Square Enix, made it pretty clear that the game would be a PlayStation 3 exclusive in Japan and that his company was only set to begin the localization work and, more crucially, the work to port the game to the Xbox 360 after the Japanese release.
The Microsoft deal announced at E3 specifies that world wide release is to be simultaneous on all platforms, which means that Square Enix will be sitting on a complete PlayStation 3 release that gamers want to play as it works to move the entire game to the Microsoft gaming console.
So, while reading poorly translated Japanese magazine reviews of Final Fantasy XIII and importing PlayStation 3 versions at great cost, please take a short moment to “thank” Microsoft for thinking about gamers upon making the deal.