14 DAY TRIAL // Video game publisher Square Enix has announced that it has set the release date for its Japanese role playing game Final Fantasy XIII-2 in North America for January 31 of 2012, with the game playable on both the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and on the PlayStation 3 from Sony.
The company has also announced that the theme song for the new game will be sung by Charice of Warner Bros. Records Inc. and will be titled “New World”.
Square Enix also says that the team working on the game is already ready to work on downloadable content that will be put out just after launch date, although the company has not said exactly what players can expect to be available.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 will tell the story of Serah, the sister of Lightning, who is convinced that her sibling is still alive despite her disappearance.
She will join up with a number of other characters, some new and some old, to discover Lightning's fate and discover more secrets about the world of Gran Pulse.
The action is taking place three full years after the end of the adventure seen in Final Fantasy XIII and the player will be able to revisit a number of the locations he already knows, all of them affected by the passage of time and by the forces of destruction.
The development team has said that the aim with Final Fantasy XIII-2 was to allow players to explore more of the game world and to give them more options when it comes to the combat system.
Final Fantasy XIII was a big hit for Square Enix, shipping more than 6 million units, but it was far from the blockbuster nature of previous titles in the series.
XIII-2 is an attempt to get the series back on track, especially after the problems that the FF XIV MMO has been having since launch.