In Japan, the excitement is building, as the promotional machine behind the latest episode in Square-Enix’s role-playing Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy XIII, is starting to crank into action, prior to the game’s December release in the home market on PlayStation 3.

Although the game will be available in the US and Europe on Xbox 360 early next year, in Japan, Sony has sewn up an exclusive deal that should do sales of its new PS3 Slim console no harm whatsoever.

You may wonder what all the fuss is about, but such is the popularity of the Final Fantasy games in Japan that Sony can confidently expect a spike in PS3 console sales, particularly since this is the first Final Fantasy game to be produced for a high-definition console.

Furthermore, unlike here in Europe, the Japanese price of the PS3 console, at around 30,000 yen (around £200) is far from prohibitive, approximately twice the price of a Nintendo DS.

As you can see from the trailer, the game looks amazing, and it comes with a combat system that has been reworked to increase the game’s appeal to markets outside Japan. So far, the Final Fantasy series has sold around 85 million games worldwide, most of them in its home country. Will this be the game that finally makes it a truly international phenomenon?

Read more reports from this year's Tokyo Game Show on our special TGS page

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