Yes, that's right folks, some of you are suckers. Well, 'fools' if we're going to be politically correct, but deep down in your gullible hearts you know you're suckers.

There is no Kotaku interview, Nomura has not said Noctis is gay and I have no idea what he thinks of The X-Files (though I love that show). Just because it was still March 31st where you were when I posted that story, doesn't mean it wasn't April 1st anywhere else.

And, seeing as parts of the internet are giving the credit to the wrong person, I must state that IT WAS ALL ME (well not the scan, that was Shuyu). Did you have trouble accessing the link to Kotaku? That's because it doesn't exist. It's a fake link I made up to give an incredibly unbelievable and ridiculous story that I expected to last about a minute before being found out, a hint of credibility. The internet has been had, and I gleefully claim full responsibility (please don't hurt me). That's Whiplash with an 'i'.

I'd like to thank to internet for taking this story and running with it as far as it did, that's why I love you.

Our Final Fantasy XIII Spot the Difference competition finished earlier today and I can't believe how much I underestimated your want for free stuff. Over the past eight days we've received 631 entries, effectively rendering my inbox useless. I selfishly didn't tell you how to send your images to me and let you figure it out for yourselves. Luckily most of you used an image host but to the rest of you, sorry for not replying to your pleas for help but I simply didn't have time. I also apologise to people who sent in descriptions rather than images of their solutions but I couldn't count them.

I've spent a huge amount of the last 2 days checking through all your entries and out of the total 631 I received, 344 of them were correct. You can see the correct solution below. Don't worry if yours doesn't look identical. I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I'd like to thank Whiplash for actually creating the puzzle and making this possible.

Original/Solution


Now to the winner! I asked my lovely assistant to pick a random email address from the list of winners I compiled. When I searched the email address to double check the winner was correct, I realised who this person was. By an extremely weird coincidence it's someone who's helped us out before.

Shlizar Axis! Well done and thanks to everyone who took part. We'll be sure to do more competitions in the future.

For those of you wanting to get your hands on the Official Final Fantasy XIII Guide but haven't pre-ordered it yet, you're in luck! We're holding a competition where one of you lucky readers has the chance to get it for free.

All you have to do is spot the 13 differences between the screenshots below. Circle them in any imaged editing software and send your results to us via our Contact form. You must select the "Competition" subject otherwise your entry will be ignored. All entries must be in by noon GMT on the 5th March. A winner will be randomly selected from the group of correct entries and will be contacted for shipping details.

Good Luck Everyone!

We here at FinalFantasy-XIII.net have never been one to dodge the zeitgeist and so have set up a site Twitter page. It'll be updated automatically with any news posted here, as well as anything else we feel like such as minor but interesting news and site events or giveaways, etc., so make sure you follow us so you know what's happening when it happens.

We're still tweaking the design so bear with us on that front.

FinalFantasy-XIII.net Twitter Page

It's just 10 days until Final Fantasy XIII comes out in Japan and I'm sure many of you have your pre-orders ready. For those of you who don't, I hope we can provide a little more incentive. All our members are banding together to create the ultimate Japanese walkthrough project to help all players, even those with absolutely no knowledge of Japanese to complete the game. We plan on providing a clear and illustrated guide with input from the entire community plus translations of important FMVs. To learn more about the project, have a look at this post. Remember to bookmark the link below for when your copy arrives!

Final Fantasy XIII Japanese Walkthrough Project Forum

If you're still yet to pre-order your import of Final Fantasy XIII, here is a list of retailers still taking orders. The game is region free and can be played on any Playstation 3 worldwide.

Play-Asia - US$94.90 (£57.61)
Ordering off Play-Asia using the link above will provide us with commission. If possible, please use this link to help us out with hosting costs.

RenChi - US$94.90 (£57.61)
For people living in regions where Play-Asia won't ship PS3 games, Renchi.com will.

YesAsia - US$99.99 (£60.38)

Play-Asia have now begun accepting pre-orders for the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XIII. Those of you wanting to import the game can order it now for the listed price of $89.90US which is cheaper than Square-Enix's earlier announced RRP of $100. The game will be completely in Japanese but will work on all PS3s around the world.

For Advent Children Complete, we setup an affiliate link where we were given a percentage of commission for each person who ordered through it. It was extremely successful last time and allowed us to upgrade our server and improve site performance. We'd like to do the same this time with the full game. It's simple, if you wish to import the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XIII and help us out at the same time, please use the link provided below. If you're a member of our forum and you provide us with your Order Number in the pre-order thread, we'll pay you 3000 Gil for use in our Forum Store.

Pre-order Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) at Play-Asia.com

If you live in the European Union like a lot of us, I'm afraid you can't pre-order Playstation 3 games through Play-Asia due to Sony's strong stance against imports. Don't worry, we will provide a link for those of you in the EU who will ship to you when more place begin accepting pre-orders. We'll try and provide you with the best price possible.

We've recently got a new affiliate; GodofWarIII.co.uk, a God of War III fan site.

Check out the brand new trailer and screenshots at their site.

Somebody suggested today on our forums that we implement a newsletter to keep people up to date via email. I've been meaning to do this for some time but today I finally got around to it.

If you want to get all the Final Fantasy XIII news we post in your email, please subscribe using the the subscription form on the navigation bar above or by using the link below. You'll receive daily updates on all the news we've covered in the day. I hope some of you find it useful.

Subscribe to FinalFantasy-XIII.net by Email

We started updating the layout a few months ago, just making a few visual changes, and we ended up changing more than we originally intended. So here's the result! It's quite drastically different from what we had before and contains many improvements. The new layout is coded differently to the older layout which allows more things to be on the page without adding to load times. It even loads faster than it used to. Apart from the site loading faster in general, we have worked to improve the load times on areas such as the scans page. Before it would take quite a long time to load the whole page, but now you can easily browse the scans by magazine much faster and easier. The optimisation also means that the front page works in all major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Netfront (Playstation 3) and Opera). All other pages have been tested in Internet Explorer and Firefox and function fully. We plan for the whole site to be completely compatible with the other mentioned browsers in the near future.

We are still in the process of moving all of the content across to the new layout, but this should be completed within the next couple of days. In the meantime, you can still browse our newly designed Final Fantasy XIII section (Which is still being edited and updated with the latest information) until everything else has been moved over.

FinalFantasy-XIII.net and FinalFantasyVersusXIII.net Merged
Even though we've shared the same forums and layout for over a year, we're now one big site with separate domains. That means that FinalFantasy-XIII.net will have the Fabula Nova Crystallis and Final Fantasy XIII content while FinalFantasyVersusXIII.net will have the Final Fantasy Versus XIII content. We also have aquired FinalFantasyAgito-XIII.net which will have the Final Fantasy Agito XIII content on it. No more redundant content being duplicated. There's no point in us competing with ourselves.

Forum Integration
We've tried to integrate the forums into the main site a little more by adding the latest forum threads and stats into a block on the right as well as adding a login feature above. This required the forums directory to be different, so all links containing "forums.finalfantasy-xiii.net" will redirect to "finalfantasy-xiii.net/forums". Logging into the main site will eventually serve more of a purpose than just being able to see how many posts there have been since your last visit. In the future we plan to create content and features exclusive to registered forum members.

Navigation
The navigation is now at the top in tab format. For example, click on "Final Fantasy XIII" and all the links to content for it will appear below the tabs. It does require more clicks but you can also simply click the arrow button below the navigation to see all the links for all the content on the site.

Trailers
All trailers can now be streamed from our server so you can easily view them from the website without having to download them and see them in better quality than YouTube. You now also have the option to download them from two servers, Moogle and Moomba, just in case one is under a lot of stress from a large amount of users downloading at the same time. The Final Fantasy XIII E3 2006 trailer is the only one currently available but the others will be up shortly.

That's pretty much everything that isn't self explanatory. This post will be updated as we update the content sections. We have had the layout in testing for a while (for specific things like the login box), but if you notice any problems with the site after a few days then please let us know. When the site is put up one of the last things we can do is convert the news, so we are aware of the few symbol and text errors on earlier news posts and are working to fix them and they should be corrected shortly.

~ Kitmitsu and Nero

In the last week I've received 3000 emails through the contact form on our site. Of course like every week, only about 40 of these emails are from actual visitors instead of spam. Most of them are people saying how much they're looking forward to Final Fantasy XIII, a lot of them are concerning release dates they've found and some are from people thinking that we are actually Square-Enix and saying how good "our" new games look.

Firstly, although any news tips are appreciated, please remember that release dates on sites like Amazon, Gamestop or Best Buy aren't official release dates. They are simply estimates these sites have to put up to begin accepting pre-orders and are in no way confirmed. In total I've received 127 emails telling me that the release date is on one of these sites. Next, no we aren't Square-Enix :P we're just a fansite. We're glad you like the look of the Final Fantasy XIII games but if you want to contact Square-Enix, it's much harder than filling in our contact form. I suppose it's flattering in a way that people can get confused into thinking this site is owned by Square-Enix.

I hope that this saves some people time instead of writing paragraphs to someone who isn't who they think. Also I apologise if I don't have a chance to reply to any of your emails. This is because my university connection blocks all out going emails from email clients.