Play-Asia have now begun accepting pre-orders for the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XIII. Those of you wanting to import the game can order it now for the listed price of $89.90US which is cheaper than Square-Enix's earlier announced RRP of $100. The game will be completely in Japanese but will work on all PS3s around the world.

For Advent Children Complete, we setup an affiliate link where we were given a percentage of commission for each person who ordered through it. It was extremely successful last time and allowed us to upgrade our server and improve site performance. We'd like to do the same this time with the full game. It's simple, if you wish to import the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XIII and help us out at the same time, please use the link provided below. If you're a member of our forum and you provide us with your Order Number in the pre-order thread, we'll pay you 3000 Gil for use in our Forum Store.

Pre-order Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) at Play-Asia.com

If you live in the European Union like a lot of us, I'm afraid you can't pre-order Playstation 3 games through Play-Asia due to Sony's strong stance against imports. Don't worry, we will provide a link for those of you in the EU who will ship to you when more place begin accepting pre-orders. We'll try and provide you with the best price possible.

We've recently got a new affiliate; GodofWarIII.co.uk, a God of War III fan site.

Check out the brand new trailer and screenshots at their site.

Somebody suggested today on our forums that we implement a newsletter to keep people up to date via email. I've been meaning to do this for some time but today I finally got around to it.

If you want to get all the Final Fantasy XIII news we post in your email, please subscribe using the the subscription form on the navigation bar above or by using the link below. You'll receive daily updates on all the news we've covered in the day. I hope some of you find it useful.

Subscribe to FinalFantasy-XIII.net by Email

We started updating the layout a few months ago, just making a few visual changes, and we ended up changing more than we originally intended. So here's the result! It's quite drastically different from what we had before and contains many improvements. The new layout is coded differently to the older layout which allows more things to be on the page without adding to load times. It even loads faster than it used to. Apart from the site loading faster in general, we have worked to improve the load times on areas such as the scans page. Before it would take quite a long time to load the whole page, but now you can easily browse the scans by magazine much faster and easier. The optimisation also means that the front page works in all major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Netfront (Playstation 3) and Opera). All other pages have been tested in Internet Explorer and Firefox and function fully. We plan for the whole site to be completely compatible with the other mentioned browsers in the near future.

We are still in the process of moving all of the content across to the new layout, but this should be completed within the next couple of days. In the meantime, you can still browse our newly designed Final Fantasy XIII section (Which is still being edited and updated with the latest information) until everything else has been moved over.

FinalFantasy-XIII.net and FinalFantasyVersusXIII.net Merged
Even though we've shared the same forums and layout for over a year, we're now one big site with separate domains. That means that FinalFantasy-XIII.net will have the Fabula Nova Crystallis and Final Fantasy XIII content while FinalFantasyVersusXIII.net will have the Final Fantasy Versus XIII content. We also have aquired FinalFantasyAgito-XIII.net which will have the Final Fantasy Agito XIII content on it. No more redundant content being duplicated. There's no point in us competing with ourselves.

Forum Integration
We've tried to integrate the forums into the main site a little more by adding the latest forum threads and stats into a block on the right as well as adding a login feature above. This required the forums directory to be different, so all links containing "forums.finalfantasy-xiii.net" will redirect to "finalfantasy-xiii.net/forums". Logging into the main site will eventually serve more of a purpose than just being able to see how many posts there have been since your last visit. In the future we plan to create content and features exclusive to registered forum members.

Navigation
The navigation is now at the top in tab format. For example, click on "Final Fantasy XIII" and all the links to content for it will appear below the tabs. It does require more clicks but you can also simply click the arrow button below the navigation to see all the links for all the content on the site.

Trailers
All trailers can now be streamed from our server so you can easily view them from the website without having to download them and see them in better quality than YouTube. You now also have the option to download them from two servers, Moogle and Moomba, just in case one is under a lot of stress from a large amount of users downloading at the same time. The Final Fantasy XIII E3 2006 trailer is the only one currently available but the others will be up shortly.

That's pretty much everything that isn't self explanatory. This post will be updated as we update the content sections. We have had the layout in testing for a while (for specific things like the login box), but if you notice any problems with the site after a few days then please let us know. When the site is put up one of the last things we can do is convert the news, so we are aware of the few symbol and text errors on earlier news posts and are working to fix them and they should be corrected shortly.

~ Kitmitsu and Nero

In the last week I've received 3000 emails through the contact form on our site. Of course like every week, only about 40 of these emails are from actual visitors instead of spam. Most of them are people saying how much they're looking forward to Final Fantasy XIII, a lot of them are concerning release dates they've found and some are from people thinking that we are actually Square-Enix and saying how good "our" new games look.

Firstly, although any news tips are appreciated, please remember that release dates on sites like Amazon, Gamestop or Best Buy aren't official release dates. They are simply estimates these sites have to put up to begin accepting pre-orders and are in no way confirmed. In total I've received 127 emails telling me that the release date is on one of these sites. Next, no we aren't Square-Enix :P we're just a fansite. We're glad you like the look of the Final Fantasy XIII games but if you want to contact Square-Enix, it's much harder than filling in our contact form. I suppose it's flattering in a way that people can get confused into thinking this site is owned by Square-Enix.

I hope that this saves some people time instead of writing paragraphs to someone who isn't who they think. Also I apologise if I don't have a chance to reply to any of your emails. This is because my university connection blocks all out going emails from email clients.

Forgotten Memories is hosting their annual Forgotten Awards and this year we've entered. We managed to get into three categories. Best Layout, Best Forum and Best Overall. Voting began a few days ago and I'd appreciate any visitors to the site to help us along. All you have to do is go to this link and vote for "Final Fantasy - XIII" under each of the categories we're entered into.

The Forgotten Awards - Voting

The great thing is, if you really want to help us, you can vote again two days after casting your vote and can keep doing this until the awards end. Voting ends on December 18th. Thanks for your support!

If you're someone who uses the internet on your PSP, you'll know how slow it is. That's why I've developed a PSP version of our site to make it quicker for the few people who use them to keep up with any updates. You can reach it in two ways.

Firstly, you can visit it by simply going to our main site (http://finalfantasy-xiii.net) where it will redirect to the new PSP version automatically. One problem with this way though, is that it does load part of the main site before redirecting. The other way to instantly get onto the new version is by directly visiting this address on your PSP:

http://finalfantasy-xiii.net/psp.php

The PSP site loads much faster than the main site does because of smaller images and the smaller amount of text. Hopefully some of you will find it useful but remember it's still hasn't been fully tested yet so there may be some small bugs. If any of you are interested, here is what it looks like on a PSP. Enjoy!

FinalFantasy-XIII.net PSP Preview Photo

It's been nine months thanks to Square-Enix's quiet approach to publicising the Fabula Nova Crystallis compilation, but we now have our second issue of FNC Magazine, thanks to our recently promoted Magazine Editor, Pulse.

Fabula Nova Crystallis Magazine Issue Two

This issue is dedicated to what little information we have on Final Fantasy Versus XIII. It covers all the information we have so far from E3 2006 to this TGS. I've once again used the gallery to display it but this

It has been exactly one year since I put up our main site and to celebrate this, here is a new layout. It's my second ever layout and it took me well over a month to finally finish. It's a little wider to match our new forum skin and I think it looks much more professional than our previous one.

One of the new features is our feature scroller which will be updated to include the biggest news features. The news software has also been changed to make it more reliable and make sure none of our news is ever lost again. The Fabula Nova Crystallis content has also been updated with everything we know so far. I hope everyone enjoys the changes.

One of our forum members (Pulse) has taken the time to make a fan magazine which summarises all our knowledge on the Fabula Nova Crystallis compilation. It's impressive enough to deserve its own page on our site so everyone take a look! This issue focuses on FFXIII and he already has plans to make further issues.

Fabula Nova Crystallis Issue One

I've added the magazine to a gallery to make it easier to navigate through the pages. Note that the gallery does take a little while to load in Internet Explorer because all the images load at once.