* The bonuses for FFXIII owners keep on increasing. Now Toriyama says that if you have FFXIII save data (it doesn't have to be clear data, just save data), you'll get special monster decorations. Additionally, you'll get higher success rates in the game's casino area. The title screen will also have some sort of bonus.
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* You can make Odin into an ally monster. He first appears as a boss for one of the game's episodes.
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[More !]
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This is the magazine's third perfect score of the year following Zelda Skyward Sword and Elder Scrolls Skyrim. Final Fantasy XIII scored almost perfect back in 2009, with three 10s and a 9.
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The PlayStation 3 version of Final Fantasy XIII-2 will have a first shipment of one million units, retail blog Sinobi said in a post today. The site did not provide a source for this figure, but they tend to be in the know about this sort of things so we'll take their word on it.
If true, the million figure would be a little more than half of what Square Enix shipped for the original Final Fantasy XIII at its launch. On launch day in December 2009, Square Enix announced that the game had shipped 1.8 million units (see this story).
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The “Guided Tour” trailer demonstrates several of the game’s systems using actual footage.
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XIII-2's new monster collection component was one of the many topics discussed during the game's pre-release special that aired on BS-11 last night.
The show also provided a glimpse at the game's creature design work. Each creature took about a month to complete.
Just a few hours before the official launch event (AKB48's Yuko Oshima is probably wearing her skimpy download content costume right now!), Square Enix has shared screens of Final Fantasy XIII-2's "Omega" download content.
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Square Enix is holding the official launch even for Final Fantasy XIII-2 at the Bic Camera in Yurakucho today. CEO Yoichi Wada will be joined by producer Yoshinori Kitase, director Motomu Toriyama, songstress Mai Fukui, AKB48 member Yuko Oshima, and a bunch of other people who don't really matter.
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We'll be posting the pics Alex sends back in this space, most likely without any text for context, so be sure and check back over the next hour or so. The event officially begins at 6:30 and runs through 7:00.
[Live blog ...]
01. [PS3] Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Square Enix, 12/15): 525,271
02. [3DS] Monster Hunter 3G (Capcom, 12/10): 208,427 (730,386)
03. [3DS] Mario Kart 7 (Nintendo, 12/01): 182,418 (789,871)
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It's out in Japan:
Final Fantasy XIII-2 Sells 500,000 Units First Week
http://andriasang.com/comzgc/media_create_sales/
That number is a disaster for a FF title.
The original Final Fantasy XIII, released in Japan on December 17th, 2009, sold 1,501,964 copies (on PlayStation 3) in its first week on shelves. In comparison, XIII-2, released on December 15th, 2011, only sold 524,217 copies (also on PS3) in its first week. That’s about one-third of the original game’s sales.
To put things in perspective, the last major PlayStation 3 RPG released in Japan was Namco Bandai’s Tales of Xillia, released in September. That game sold 525,605 copies in its first week, beating out XIII-2 sales by a slight margin.
On the flip side, Final Fantasy XIII-2 also took far less time to develop than Final Fantasy XIII.
Sales tracker, Media-Create, confirms this, reporting that Final Fantasy XIII-2 on the PlayStation 3 only sold 62.06% of the stock that Square Enix sent out. Doing the math, that tells us Square shipped about 845,000 copies of the game.
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Media-Create provide their own analysis of why they feel Final Fantasy XIII-2’s sales were so low in comparison to the original Final Fantasy XIII. They believe one of the reasons is due to falling interest among women. Female interest dropped from 31.3% (FFXIII) to 22.2% (XIII-2).