Thursday, March 29, 2012

Theatrhythm Localization!

Four months ago I posted about a new Final Fantasy game I'd read about: Theatrhythm. The idea of the game is that you tap the 3DS screen (ala Elite Beat Agents) in rhythm to music from the Final Fantasy series. It looked absolutely amazing but was only scheduled for release in Japan. I'd searched around a bit at the time to see if I could find info about a potential US release but there was nothing. What I did find were a lot of critics and reviews on various gaming websites which were all neutral to negative. The comments on those reviews were even worse. A lot of people really, really hate the idea. Mostly they seemed bitter than FFXIII didn't meet their expectations and felt like Square-Enix was wrecking the series and just trying to milk people for extra money while having no good ideas. Things were even worse when it turned out to be the first DS game with downloadable content that you had to pay for.

And then the game came out in Japan and blew all the critics away. Apparently people lined up at stores in Japan to get their copies and many stores sold out on the first weekend. It's been out barely more than a month and only in Japan and is already the 48th most sold 3DS game. By pretty much any metric it was a success. I had high hopes that it might still get ported...

Then Andrew pointed out to me yesterday that they'd announced localizations! No exact date yet, but it will be out sometime this summer. I find it pretty unlikely I'll be at the end of my marathon by then... I don't think I'll care! Final Fantasy music is too awesome to delay.

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