Ben-DutkaFinal Fantasy may have become one of those legendary video game franchises that doesn't necessarily need insanely high review scores to sell extremely well.
The name alone can entice millions. According to Andriasang , Square-Enix has announced that over 3 million copies of Final Fantasy XIII have already been shipped to North America and Europe to support the game's March 9 launch. This brings the total shipment number to 5 million after 2 million landed in Japan between December and February. Obviously, the game is a tremendous sales success everywhere, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the industry over the past few generations. All told, the long-running RPG series has shipped over 96 million copies of their beloved games all around the world. That is another tremendous achievement, especially considering the fact that role-playing has always been a relatively niche genre in comparison to sports, FPS, and action/adventure games. Perhaps the key to FF's success has been the appeal it has always held for all major regions of the world; Japan, North America and Europe always respond very, very well to every new installment. It's the premier RPG franchise, to be sure.
By the way, you can expect our review of FFXIII within the next couple of days. I'm knee-deep (or maybe only shin-deep) right now; give me a bit more time and we'll be good to go.
Related Game(s): Final Fantasy XIII
Yeah I'm about 10-12 hours in so far, and it's fantastic. The characters, story, graphics are all solid.
While I'd pick the oldschool real turn based battle system anyday, this one has definitely began growing on me the further in I get. At first it seemed like it was very much a one button system but as more layers of complexity were added, and the enemies became more challenging it became a lot more fun. I can't wait to see how the story turns out.
Also the linearity/lack of NPCs/towns doesn't seem to do a whole lot to diminish its enjoyability for me, which I found surprising. I was sure that without more exploration it would seem drab, but that's not the case. It seems to work with the course the plot line has charted so far.