Fasten your unnecessary and gratuitous belts, people: Final Fantasy XIII will be hitting Japan on December 17th, and coming to the West by Spring 2010 – hopefully.
Square-Enix president Yoichi Wada took a break out of his busy Dragon Quest IX schedule to announce at a Final Fantasy XIII event that the latest title in the company’s flagship JRPG series would be hitting Japanese PS3s on December 17th. Apparently, Japanese gamers have something to put on their wish lists for the holidays … or whatever the Japanese equivalent is, anyway.
The game will retail for 8,800 yen, or $95/£58, which means that shelling out the cash for the next installment of pretty boys with improbable hair and improbable swords jumping around improbably might just feel like taking a Meteor to your bank account. There will also be a special FF13 hardware bundle, said Kaz Hirai, though information on pricing (or indeed, anything beyond “there will be a bundle”) has yet to be announced. It will also be exclusive to the PS3 in Japan, though will be coming to Microsoft’s 360 as well as Sony’s machine when it hits in the West.
The big question now, of course, is when will it hit in the West? Previously, the game’s producer Yoshinori Kitase had mentioned that the game was on track for Spring 2010, and that seems to still be the case – 1UP reports that Square-Enix intends to bring the game across the Pacific no later than “six to eight months” after its launch in Japan. Which seems a bit more like “spring to summer 2010” to me.
Either way, a release date in the West should be due shortly: “We plan to announce the Western release timing of Final Fantasy XIII in the very near future,” said a Squeenix rep to Edge.
