Final Fantasy XIII will Finally be Here...in March

Last Friday, Square Enix posted a riddle on their site, "A Henchmen Inventor Tent Unto", which was quickly solved to be "ANNOUNCEMENT NOV THIRTEENTH". The announcement we've been waiting for has finally come. Final Fantasy XIII will be released for the Xbox 360 on March 9, 2010. (You can unlock a special Xbox Live item by doing what it says here!) Below is the announcement video that talks with the creators of the game. Getting past the overly dramatic opening with a guy that reminds me of Mulder (seriously it's almost a full minute of this dude blabbing about how great Final Fantasy is. I mean if we didn't know that, then we probably wouldn't care about the release date anyways.), this video shows some pretty cool new battle scenes. It talks about a new battle thing called Paradigm shift. It happens in the middle of the battle and gives the player real-time control. Personally, I like the idea of real-time battles in comparison to the usual turn-based battles of Final Fantasy.

Also, I'm not really sure why, but Sazh is completely ignored as a main character in this video. They show quite a bit of Fang in the battle scenes, who is also listed in the main characters on the FFXIII site; and mention all the other main characters by name though. I'm really excited that they finally announced the release; and that it isn't around next Christmas, like it could have been.