"And Square Enix's art style largely appeals to Japanese gamers' preferences, no?"

LOL They hired a voice actor who's never even played a video game: *artificial enthusiasm* You can use ACTION CHIPS to perform special ATTACKS and use POWERFUL MAGIC!!!!!! *artificial enthusiasm*

Really looking forward to FFXIV for some reason. Was a fan of FFXI, but it was technically unimpressive. Hope they can pull off the whole "even casual players can enjoy the game" claim, 'cause I don't have 15 hours a day to sink into a game. :P

Hm. I'm pretty sure you caught the baby and made the starfish. Don't try to fool we Kotaku faithfuls!

@frog_man1975: Hm. Well, they ARE Japanese. :D They're crazy people. Your guess is as good as mine.

@frog_man1975: Why does EVERYTHING have to be about race? Jesus, it's just a damn bird sitting on his head.

@Kiri Komori: Ha ha. I could never make it as a map designer...the industry's tough.

I personally am psyched about menu-based battles. Call me old-school, but I love micromanaging my battles... Too bad you can't switch to other party members. :-\ We'll see how it plays!

FFXIII's map designers just learned about y = mx + b, give 'em a break. They haven't even fathomed such futuristic equations as y = mx^2 + b!

Happy Birthday, PlayStation! :D Unlike cheese and wine (so they say), it seems as if you only get worse with age. :-\

@zdevex: I'm no expert, but it seems to make sense that advanced GPU hardware would have enough horsepower to render all of the textures much more sharply, apply high levels of anti-aliasing to smooth edges, etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah. Something like that. .

I think they should release an actual card game based on the video game, which coincidentally is about a card game... Keep the loop going.

@shufflemoomin: Heh. Good point. If I were Iwata, I'd close shop, end on a high (and rich) note, and say, "Thank you very much; it's been great." :)

"When Avatars are used in a group of three or more, consider including different ethnicities."

Why don't they call this compilation "When Sega Didn't Suck Collection" er somethin' like that? :)

This article's title could probably be changed to something like "Report: Nintendo Still Rich"

Hm. That 50-60 hour count probably doesn't include ALL the time Lightning will spend just standing in place while I desperately search Google for "code to revive Aeris." Oh wait, I'm thinking of another game...

@Mayor Wilkins: Ah, it's all good. In retrospect, it wasn't very creative. :) But my humor tends to be mostly something like "no duh, you really had to say that?" Either way, it's cool that both powerhouse consoles will get to play this game. Looks like a winner.

@Beatnik11: Yup. I think it's just a cheap tactic to pump out a "new game" to get sales with practically no work. I really feel that way about ANY re-release that isn't a compilation, offers significantly compelling features, or is impractical or impossible to play due to age or limited availability, etc.

@Thorinator: Wow, first-time Kotaku comment burn I suppose. You know, sometimes part of a joke is how blatantly out of context or wrong it is... And it was mostly based off on an earlier joke concept someone created with a 20-something disc box set for FFXIII on the 360.