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Final Fantasy XIII Still PS3 Only
Square Enix recently announced some of the games to be showcased at their "private party" in August. Looking at the games listed we see that Final Fantasy XIII seems to still be PS3 only and the rumors that Final Fantasy Agito XIII was canned seem to be highly overrated.
Final Fantasy has always been focused on one platform. They push the hell out of every polygon budget, every memory limit, that they can get out of the hardware. Even if the core libraries are easily portable, I can imagine they don't relish the thought of porting or dual-targeting the title, because the game will not look as good on one of the platforms. For a title that is all about visuals, that's hard to take.
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Sadly, I don't think that even Final Fantasy could make the Japanese want to buy an XBox. It would just alienate the fans. Considering the popularity of the systems, and the fact that FF doesn't require amazing graphics, I'm surprised they don't put it out on the Wii.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
FFXII was set in a world created for the earlier game Final Fantasy Tactics, and the team was lead by the folks behind that game. As far as I know, all previous games have had a completely new world, with the possible exception of FFIX.
I am a touch concerned, though, as you are, about the upcoming Final Fantasy games. This recent approach by Square-Enix to make the Final Fantasy series into multiple-game affairs spread across everything from portables and cellphones up to the latest cutting-edge home console is causing them to over-think and over-engineer the worlds in which their characters reside. The games, or to be more specific the stories, are losing their focus and suffering for it.
On the upside, at least they're re-releasing Final Fantasy IV on the DS with updated visuals. (That's FFII from the SNES) It'll be nice to take that trip back in time to when the worlds were self-contained and focused on the premise rather than providing fodder for all the requisite/inevitable spin-offs.
A lot of the later PS3 games require installation. I believe Grand Theft Auto needs ~4GB of hard drive space (it's printed on the back of the game). And from my PS3 experience (I own one), installing games can be one way to do it. Download a game from PSN, and it comes in a "capsule" that you click and install (why?!?! It's not like you can copy it off to a memory card...). Then after waiting for it to be installed, you click the new version and the game launches.
Not sure if the PS3 discs do that (probably just start up and ask to install).
About the only real thing one notices about the PS3 is that doing almost anything involves reading an EULA before you can do anything. (Besides the initial set up - installing games often pops up another EULA, as do software updates). So the "installation experience" is already here...