For a brief moment last night a page for Final Fantasy XIII appeared on the official Japanese Xbox site. Was it simply a clumsy mistake, or is the game possibly not so PS3-exclusive in Japan?
Either some hapless intern over at Xbox Japan HQ just got fired, or some puppet master marketer is playing us in the palm of his or her hand. For a brief magical instant last night, Final Fantasy XIII appeared on the official Xbox site. Not just any official Xbox site. The Japanese official Xbox site. You might recall that, unlike the rest of the world, only the PS3 is getting FFXIII in Japan.
So, why, then would the game suddenly have a page on Xbox’s Japan site? Microsoft said it was all just a mistake. “The FFXIII page you pointed out was actually accidentally uploaded onto the Japanese website during web management operations and has now been taken down,” Xbox Japan told Kotaku. “There is no change to what has already been announced that this title will be released in North America and Europe.”
So there just happened to be a Final Fantasy XIII screenshots, a trailer and a banner with Japanese lettering on it (lettering I’ll point out is absent from the logo for the game in the West) that ended up mistakenly on the Japanese site?
I understand that sometimes the tiniest errors lead to big mistakes when it comes to running a website, and that the assets on the page could’ve been intended for the Western Xbox.com page. But the presence of that banner with the Japanese logo is nagging me – that couldn’t have been meant for any other page than a Japanese FFXIII one, right? Not to mention that the PR quote above only makes mention of no changes for the NA and EU release, but nothing of Japan, which is really the issue here. Maybe I’m just spinning conspiracy theories here. Maybe I’m just crazy. That’s what they tell me sometimes.
Published: Jun 11, 2009 08:44 pm