Episode Zero, Final Fantasy XIII's prologue story, had it's final chapter released last December and successfully filled in the blanks of the games storyline. Today Square Enix has announced that the story will be turned into a Drama CD.

Final Fantasy XIII Episode Zero Promise Fabula Nova Dramatica Alpha as it's unfortunately called, will retell the story of the prologue featuring the full original voice cast from the game. The first pressing will also include a script booklet and a limited edition sleeve case. The CD will be available on September 15th in Japan priced at ¥3,000.

Source: Andriasang

Back in March, rumours of Playstation 3's freezing while playing Final Fantasy XIII circulated the internet. Now it's been revealed that some customers are claiming that the game actually caused their systems to break and become unusable.

Daniel Wolf has filed a class action lawsuit against Square Enix and Sony Computer Entertainment for the damage caused to his system and their neglect to fix the issue. When Wolf contacted Sony and Square Enix they admitted the issue existed but blamed it on each other. This failure for each company to take responsibility lead to the lawsuit being filed on June 2nd.

Let's see where this case goes.

Source: IGN.com

Final Fantasy XIII has been out worldwide for just over a month now and despite the lowest review scores of a numbered Final Fantasy title so far, it's managed to shift 1,322,500 copies in the US alone.

Sony announced today that 828,200 of those copies were sold for the PS3 while 494,300 copies were sold on Xbox 360. Square's multi-platform tactic proved to be incredibly effective with Xbox 360 sales expanding the audience by over 50%. This can be compared to FFXII's US launch back in 2006 where 896,000 copies were sold in the first month.

Source: Kotaku

In an interview with Kotaku about Final Fantasy Versus XIII, director Tetsuya Nomura has revealed that protagonist Noctis is homosexual. "I wanted to make this game seem real world, modern, edgy and I feel having an openly homosexual character will help to give it these qualities", Nomura revealed seemingly quite casually when being questioned about the feel of the game and how it would differ from other titles in the FNC compilation.

Nomura also hinted that the game may involve encounters with extra-terrestrials and a covert plot to allow them to colonise the world, using alien-human hybrids as slaves, saying, "The X-Files were a huge influence on me when I was working on plot and story concepts". "Before we had worked out Noct's name we were calling him 'Fox'", he continued, a clear reference to X-Files protagonist Fox Mulder. "Not that I think David Duchovny or Mulder are gay, you know, I didn't take that from the show, I came up with it by myself."

It remains to be seen just to what extent the hit 90s show has impacted on the game, but Nomura's statements seem to indicate that it will be quite significant.

Source: Kotaku

Square Enix has announced today that Final Fantasy XIII has sold over one million copies in North America during it's first week. According to Square, it's the best first week performance of any of their franchises in the US. There's no doubting that the reason for these record breaking sales for the series is due to it appearing on both Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

In contrast, FFXIII sold 1.5 million units in Japan during it's launch week exclusively on PS3. It became the fifth best selling game of 2009 despite it being release at the end of the year.

Source: Gamasutra

The first weeks sales for Final Fantasy XIII have been tallied in the UK by retail tracker Chart-Track and the result is unsurprising. FFXIII is number one in the chart followed by Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Just Dance. Official sales figures are yet to be released.

However, this is of course the first multi-platform Final Fantasy. Although the Final Fantasy series is more of a Playstation franchise, the PS3 only claimed 54% of the sales. That means 46% of copies in the UK are for Xbox 360. This could be a combination of stronger than usual 360 sales in the UK compared to the rest of Europe as well as the exclusive advertising Microsoft has been plastering everywhere. It's still a small victory for the PS3 however. It seems brand loyalty and nostalgia does count for something.

Source: MCV

Final Fantasy XIII's producer and director were interviewed at the French launch event on Tuesday by WriteAboutGames. During the interview, Kitase and Toriyama were quizzed on whether they would like to see a direct sequel to FFXIII. "That depends on how well the game sells in the West!" After being pressed further they share their thoughts.

"In the past three years we worked both on the world and on the various systems. Creating these systems isn’t very glamorous and can frankly be a bit boring. If we could do a XIII-2, we could direct all our attention to the story and refine what we have already built."

It isn't shocking when you look at the companies recent track record. Square Enix has been focused on creating direct sequels to Final Fantasy titles ever since the merger. After FFX-2 there was the Final Fantasy VII compilation and Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. This could end up being one of the unannounced Fabula Nova Crystallis titles.

Source: WriteAboutGames

Several of us who have played both the Japanese and International releases of Final Fantasy XIII have noticed some rather irritating changes made to how the game plays. Although the differences are minor, they still have us wondering - Why?

Vibration
Many people have claimed that there is no vibration in the English PS3 version of FFXIII. This is untrue. However, how powerful the vibration is has been changed dramatically. You seldom feel it during gameplay and when you do, it's so weak it's barely worth having. This is the first game I've played where the vibration is at such a low frequency I can actually hear the motor inside my controller struggling.

Save Points
An extremely minor problem but I assume some of you have come across it. In the Japanese release, when you exit the save menu, you could hold down the analogue stick while the screen quickly switched back to gameplay and you'd immediately start running. Now if you do that you'll stay motionless. You have to release the analogue stick and then try again.

Shroud Menu
Known as the Smoke Menu in the Japanese release, you could run around with it open and use it at the most opportune moment. Now when you press L1 to open the shroud menu you can't move. This means you have to make sure you're the perfect distance from your target to use an aerosol or the time limit will run out and you'll end up wasting it. This gets especially annoying later in the game. Several times I've had to get so close to an enemy that I've alerted them and not had enough time to fumble through the menu.

You could say we're making a big deal about nothing but the main reason I'm posting this is because I just don't see the reason for making changes that make the experience slightly less enjoyable. We'll give you our final thoughts on the game over the following days.

Square Enix has revealed that they've shipped 3 million copies of Final Fantasy XIII for the international release of the game yesterday. How many of those copies actually sell is something we'll find out at a later date but you can bet that it's definitely the majority of them. Including the 2 million copies of FFXIII that shipped back in December for the Japanese release, that brings the titles total shipped amount of copies to 5 million worldwide.

Source: Kotaku

It may have taken far longer than we expected but Final Fantasy XIII has finally been released worldwide. I'm sure most of you are too busy furiously racing through the game to read this but we hope you've enjoyed our coverage over the past few years and will continue reading our future coverage of the Fabula Nova Crystallis compilation.

Thanks from all of us at FinalFantasy-XIII.net.