Quite well, especially if you consider the competition to be New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which has sold another 568,000 copies, just a hop, skip and jump away from crossing the two million mark in Japan. And speaking of selling two million copies of something to Japanese consumers, it appears Nintendo's other hit, Tomodachi Collection, has done just that. The Nintendo DS game once again shows off its long legs, securing third place behind Final Fantasy XIII and New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

And what games would dare go up against Square Enix? Well, clothes-ripping, breast-teasing PSP game Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos, which moved 50,000 copies to horny Japanese gamers in its debut week.

A handful of other competitors also made first appearances on this week's Media Create software sales chart, highlighted below. Can you find them all?! Probably, since they've been bolded.

01. Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) - 1,502,000 / NEW
02. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) - 568,000 / 1,934,000
03. Tomodachi Collection (DS) - 166,000 / 2,090,000
04. Pokemon SoulSilver / HeartGold (DS) - 111,000 / 3,340,000
05. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) - 93,000 / 1,201,000
06. Inazuma Eleven 2: Fire / Blizzard (DS) - 71,000 / 808,000
07. PokePark Wii: Pikachu no Daibouken (Wii) - 71,000 / 192,000
08. Layton Kyouju to Majin no Fue (DS) - 54,000 / 496,000
09. Phantasy Star Portable 2 (PSP) - 50,000 / 412,000
10. Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos (PSP) - 50,000 / NEW

11. Wii Sports Resort (Wii)
12. Taiko no Tatsujin Wii Dodoon to 2 Yome! (Wii)
13. Pen 1 Grand Prix: Penguin no Mondai Special (DS)
14. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (DS)
15. Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Gundam Next Plus (PSP)
16. New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
17. Naruto Shippuuden: Narutimate Accel 3 (PSP)
18. World Soccer Winning Eleven 2010 (PSP)
19. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3)
20. Sengoku Musou 3 (Wii)
21. Tales of Graces (Wii)
22. Power Pro Kun Pocket 12 (DS)
23. Stitch! Ohana to Rhythm de Daibouken (DS)
24. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
25. Tamagotchi no Narikiri Channel (DS)
26. Katekyoo Hitman Reborn! DS Ore Ga Bosu! Saikyou Famiri Taisen (DS)
27. Momotarou Dentetsu 2010 Senkoku Ishin no Hero Daisyuugou ! No Ken (Wii)
28. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (Wii)
29. World Soccer Winning Eleven 2010 (PS2)
30. Metal Fight Beyblade: Bakutan Cyber Pegasus (DS)

Snapped at the recent Jump Festa in Japan, this cosplayer didn't stop at the costume, oh no, but sports a solid effort at the Sazh afro. We like the pose, and the plastic bag is pretty neat, too!

［JUMP FESTA '10］リアルすぎるFF13サッズのレイヤー [Kotaku Japan]

Enterbrain puts Final Fantasy XIII sales at over 1.5 million over the course of the game's first four days on Japanese store shelves, selling through a major portion of the reported 1.8 million copies shipped. About 1.1 million of those are apparently from day one sales.

The boon to the PlayStation 3? Some 240,000 plus consoles sold in one week, including that fancy Lightning Edition PS3 released alongside the exclusive-in-Japan role-playing game. That's a considerable spike, as the previous week's figures, according to sales tracker Media Create, shows some 75,000 PlayStation 3s sold in Japan the week before FF13 hit.

ファイナルファンタジー13、発売初週で実売150万本　PS3本体も週間24万台販売＝PS3歴代1位 [Yahoo! JP]

The focus here is largely pigtailed character Oerba Dia Vanille and her underoos. This close-ups have reveal more than in-game character panty preferences — check out those textures and polygons.

FF13にはちゃんとパンチラあります 安心してご購入ください [はちま起稿]

And that number has "exceeded one million". Which, well, makes it sound like they sold between 1 and 1.1 million. The news was disclosed in a statement released by Square Enix today, which also states that copies of the game sold bundled with a PS3 - as part of the "Lightning Edition" - were not included in that figure. If you account for those, the figure would be slightly higher.

Square Enix said yesterday that two million copies of the game had been shipped to retailers. Now, there's no way Sony sold one million Lightning Editions, so...anyone hanging on an import copy, don't sweat it, doesn't sound like the game's completely sold out.

The only thing that's free is a personal space, and that's only free until January 14, after which it'll cost ¥600. Everything else, from chairs to rugs to outfits (there are 20 items in total) will cost you, prices ranging from ¥100 (USD$1.10) for the Chocobo that goes inside Sazh's wig (available in early January) and running to ¥600 (USD$6.60) for full costumes.

Note: The ESRB blurb might contain what some could call spoilers. It does contain boobs. Side boobs.

Players assume the roles of heroes caught in a war between two opposing forces in this fantasy role playing game. Players travel between the planet Pulse and a moon named Cocoon to engage in missions for magical beings called the "fal'Cie. Missions involve battling enemy soldiers and creatures by using melee attacks (swords, knives, staffs, etc.), firearms, and magic spells (lightning strikes, fire blasts, etc.).
 
Combat is executed through a modified turn-based system in which players select various commands from a menu while freely moving one of three heroes through the battlefield. Players can also summon elemental creatures to battle an assortment of goblins, golems, zombies, wolves, frogs, bats, and robots.
 
The game's cinematic cutscenes contain the most intense depictions of violence: machine gunfire from space ships strafe human characters below; humans and robotic soldiers exchange gunfire-aboard vessels, on the ground; a slow-motion gunfight depicts the cracked lens of a robot shot in the head by two semi-automatics.
 
Cutscenes occasionally depict female characters dressed in revealing outfits: Holographic dancers-clad in bikini tops, skimpy leotards, and backless chaps-glide above the city during a festivity performance; flying-motorcycle models wear skin-tight tops that expose deep cleavage. And during one elaborate sequence, a female character transforms from a crystal statue back to her human form-sparkle effects, camera panning, and shimmering lights partially obscure the nude character, though side-portions of her breasts are visible (fleeting-one-to-two seconds). The game also contains the expletives "a*s," "damn," and "hell"; however, it is the violent content, the suggestive themes that account for the Teen rating.

Enjoy teenage gamers!

Final Fantasy XIII [ESRB via Siliconera]

FFXIII dungeon maps have been popping up online. And the ones that have been have something in common. Can you figure it out?

(The could be what Famitsu was referring to when it said the story was linear.)

Final Fantasy XIII is a long, long game, and there are bound to be many different types of dungeons. Hopefully they're not all on a straight line. Curves, please, curves!

Otherwise the game's walk through will look like this:

1). Enter dungeon.
2). Walk straight.

ハングドエッジ - ファイナルファンタジー13　攻略 [GAYM via オレ的]

FINAL FANTASY XIII 本日発売、どんな感じなのか早速買ってきて開封してみた [GIGAZINE]

There have been longer lines for game launches in Japan; however, these lines were especially impressive considering that FFXIII went on sale mid-week. The "main" countdown launch was at retailer TSUTAYA in Shibuya early this morning.

At 6:00 am, there were already a hundred people lined up to get into TSUTAYA for the countdown festivities that included violins, popstar Sayuri Sugawara singing the theme and Square Enix president leading the countdown. The line may seem short, but that is because there was a limit on how many could enter the store for the countdown. Hello fire hazard!

Lines were lengthly at other stores: According to Famitsu, at the Bic Camera in Ikebukuro, nearly 400 gamers lined up for the game at the time the store opened. There was a sizable line at the Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara with 300 strong lined up — the first in line got there at midnight for the early morning opening.

Of course, the game was available for pre-reserve so not everyone who bought the game had to line up.

『FF13』カウントダウンイベント実況は終了しました（動画あり） and 『ファイナルファンタジー XIII』解禁！ SHIBUYA TSUTAYAイベントレポート [Kotaku Japan] [Pic]

It'll be the exact same deal as the Japanese edition - custom console, controller, copy of Final Fantasy XIII - only, for Koreans. It'll be out on January 29, 2010, and will retail for 540,000 Won, which works out to be around USD$460.

While being released in Korea isn't the surest sign the pack will make it to the West - after all, the Korean market gets a lot of Japanese hand-me-downs - you can probably take the news and forge a small crucible of hope from it.

Square Enix boss Yoichi Wada, His Imperial Hotness, has issued a release today stating that number of units shipped was actually 1.8 million (standalone copies and those included in the "Lightning Edition" combined. That's a big jump, considering there were only meant to be 1.3 million copies available for the entire week.

The number draws the launch closer in line with that of the last game in the series, Final Fantasy XII, which had two million copies on sale, albeit for a console with a much higher install base at the time.

Enjoy, as Mr. Tim Rogers - who has rested after his arduous start to the day - takes you on a guided tour of the game's battle tutorial, giving you a good look at how the game starts off.

Hint: it starts with Chocofros.

Five months and seven days ago, Square-Enix unleashed Dragon Quest IX unto the Japanese people, and it was a lukewarm kind of good. Five months and seven days after that day, it is today, and Square-Enix is set to release Final Fantasy XIII unto the public.

Japan lacks what the rest of the civilized world would call institutionalized criticism. The companies responsible for distributing, say, films, are also in charge of the magazines that, in other countries, would print critical reviews of films. No one ever says anything bad, or even constructive, about a film in Japan. They hardly ever do it about games. You get Weekly Famitsu giving out numbers. They plop in a couple of template sentences with the numbers. Everyone knows, by now, that you can pay a whole bunch of money to Famitsu, and they'll make up a big spread, spewing whatever marketing copy you want them to. The impression to the general public is that these guys are really excited about your game.

Recently, there's been bad juju afoot in most corners of the Japanese entertainment industry. Two minutes staring at the labyrinthine public bulletin board websites, and you get a thick taste of unrest. Earlier this year, user "reviews" of Dragon Quest IX started disappearing from Amazon.co.jp. The people smelled conspiracy. Of course, on the anonymous internet, nothing is certain, though more than enough people possess the theory that game publishers have started kindly asking Amazon.co.jp to delete certain comments that might otherwise keep a consumer from purchasing an item. Eventually, Amazon Japan ditched the concept of the pre-release "hype" review. They opened up message boards linked to specific product pages. In these message boards, people expressed discontent for things like the outrageous prices of DVDs (they charge around $100 for two episodes of some shitty animated TV series), or the outrageous prices of games, or their outrage that they dare to put a number in the title of Dragon Quest IX, when it's obviously some kind of side-story, like, it's on a portable system, for god's sake. Amazon Japan has now taken to fiercely moderating the message boards.

In the face of this, the rabble on 2ch.net, Japan's largest public web-place, have only grown fiercer in their contempt re: the slightest misgivings in any facet of entertainment media. In other words, I have been lolling like a leprechaun with a jagged dagger in his back, all week, while reading this Final Fantasy XIII pre-release hatred threads.

One user posts his homemade list of the reasons Final Fantasy XIII definitely won't sell a million copies:

The TV commercial is boring; it has no impact
FF12 sucked
The staff are the team who made FF10-2
Sakaguchi, Amano, and Uematsu, the three pillars of the Final Fantasy franchise, are not involved at all
The status screen shows only "attack" and "magic attack"
You can only use one character in battle
Bahamut looks stupid
The hero is a girl
Not enough people have PS3s
Why are all the summon monsters transformers?
Now, even Cid is a metrosexual

I lol at these reasons not because I agree: I lol because this is the way things are.

It's not impossible to find people who are genuinely excited about Final Fantasy XIII: just look at some blogs or the user communities on Mixi, Japan's biggest social network site. Out in the open, the typical computer-using obsessive-compulsive's opinion would seem to be that the game is going to bomb: the game is going to blow: the game is going to suck: and so on.

I was there, at the Final Fantasy XII launch. I've been over this before! A hundred-some people lined up in the decent weather. This was years ago. It was at the Tsutaya in Shibuya, which contains the busiest Starbucks in the world. There, the only size is tall, and it's the price of a grande. They do not have time to listen to your insipid little special order requests! Square-Enix has been holding their launch events there since Final Fantasy X. They're holding one again today. I'm not there. I'll get into that in a minute.

A minute later: The Final Fantasy XII launch was a nightmare. And I don't mean it was terrible, or some people died; I mean it was like one of those medium-hot nightmares, where you've lost something and you don't know what it is, just that you have to find it, or you're going to wet the bed.

I tried to talk to the first guy in line. He would not speak to me. He was shivering like with electrocution. An hour later, he was up at the podium with pre-Imperial Hot Yoichi Wada, president of Square-Enix. They call this a "photo op." Japanese marketing is so stuck in the 1950s. Seriously, they still drive trucks around your neighborhood telling you that a new furniture store's opened up five hundred meters away. So there's the president of a big corporation, shaking hands with some kid. Reporters lean in to get a quip. Wada says, "We humbly thank you for your many long years of devout customertude," and so on and so on. Then they lean the microphone in over at the kid, and he says, eyes on his shoes: "Please remake Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 Thank You" and quickly shuffles off. I literally shuddered — figuratively. The kid knew nothing about Final Fantasy XII, because he hadn't played it yet (and Square-Enix had been tight-lipped about details for months before the release. He knew nothing about XII, and

1. He was buying it anyway
2. He was dead convinced it couldn't be as good as Final Fantasy VII.

So this is Christmas, and what have we—Final Fantasy XIII?

Final Fantasy XIII, I am sure, is a fan-fearing attempt by Square-Enix to squeeze out every bit of hyper-love possible. It's a real bottoms-up adventure. Each character is designed to be someone you'd want to write a fanfic about, or dress up as at your weekly Halloween party. What the hell is it about? I'm a massive fan-jerk myself; I've read all the marketing literature, and I can't tell what in the flaming hellfire the game is supposed to be about. Guys with hats? Girls with hair? Dragons that turn into battletanks? Ice fairies that turn into motorcycles? It certainly has: a cute girl, a tough girl, a cute and tough girl, a bunch of hot guys, a little kid with a voice that seems six years too old for his height, convoluted and half-hideous, half-gorgeous flying machines, and lots of CG cut-scenes. The "final trailer" for the game cuts immediately from a turgid montage of stilted one-liners like "I fight for revenge" "Let's do this!" "Oh no, we're in danger!" and "I will never forget you" to battle scenes wherein three characters stand a three-pointer's distance from a monster as tall as an HDTV screen; a flash and blur stains the screen, and yes: everyone and everything is flying. These three characters gang-bang the shit out of this jalopy of a monster. Numbers just flying out of all sides of this reluctantly airborne, lopsided, unthinkably twirling beast.

Do I want to play this game? I don't know. I think I do. I tell myself that I can enjoy it as a piece of schlock-art. I will slowly and deeply familiarize myself with the copious plot holes big enough to fly a T-rex through, so that I can craft conversation-topical memes about them, generating future lols with my Gamer Buddies (who, come to think of it, don't exist).

I don't dare deny the distinct possibility that haircuts and flying motorcycles are the only things that Square thinks we want to see, that the game has an affecting story beneath all the glitz. A Famitsu reviewer recently gave the game a nine out of ten and mentioned that the story is "linear until about halfway through." Maybe "linear" means "derivative"? Who the hell knows.

What I'm doing, here — at six in the morning, twelve hours before my flight to America to enjoy my first American Christmas in many years — is lowering my expectations, so that I can hopefully be pleasantly surprised. I am sure I am not alone.

Well, maybe.

However, one thing is for sure. I realized this while covering the Dragon Quest IX launch: I am legally an adult. No one tells me when to go to bed, and no one tells me when to wake up! I can eat ice cream whenever I want! And I can decide that I am not boarding a packed rush-hour train to film pornographic videos of people lined up in the frozen cold. I am curious, I will admit, to see if the first person lined up to buy Final Fantasy XIII at the Tsutaya in Shibuya will harness the opportunity to ask Yoichi Wada to remake Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3, because that would be philosophically hilarious. (Here, I postulate that Final Fantasy XIII is also made from the ground up in the interest of at least preventing the first buyer from mentioning Final Fantasy VII remake possibilities.)

So, in short, I say no! No, I will not go snap pictures of people waiting in line! This is the future! Microsoft are cutting triangular slivers out of the insides of our DVD cases in the name of saving money on packaging. They are acclimating us to The Future: they'll keep taking plastic out of the package until the package disappears, until Everything is Digital. I welcome our digital future! I say, no more lining up in the cold! We have Amazon! We have 7-Eleven's reserve system!

I have reserved Final Fantasy XIII at my local 7-Eleven, located just 30-some seconds' walking distance from my front door. What I am going to do is — well, I am going to straighten my hair (I wouldn't be caught with zero HP buying a Final Fantasy game with a tangled rat's nest perched atop my head), and then I am going to walk to the 7-Eleven, and see what Square's 1 million preorders looks like from the comfort of my own neighborhood. I hope to catch a glimpse of the first person purchasing the game from my local 7-eleven. This is going to be some Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault-type shit.

For those who didn't watch the videos: I safely obtained the game.

Now that I have the game home, it is time for a video which fetishistically details the unboxing and first insertion into my PlayStation 3. I will also let you experience the first five minutes of Final Fantasy XIII as I myself experience them. It's like a liveblog, only with videos, and delayed by maybe an hour or two! Let's-a-go!

Immediately after my digital camera died on that last video, I got into a fight with a single lonely soldier. My hero whacked him over the head with her sword just as my other dude slammed him with his whatever. A cloud of numbers obscured his body for an instant. The soldier was dead before he could even look at us cross-eyed. A ranking screen flashes up. Numbers ticked, the sound of a pachinko machine on a good day: one by one, five stars filled up and glowed gold on my nice-sized HDTV. Five stars. Gold stars. "PERFECT," the game said, in not nearly so many words. I pressed the circle button once, and I'm perfect. Don't that just say it all. And then a screen comes up informing me of the items obtained: nothing. Down in the bottom-right corner, a circle button icon, and two letters: "OK." My entire HDTV is rented out in the name of telling me, via a giant vacant spreadsheet, that I didn't get any items. Reminds me of my first job (it didn't end well).

So, impressions based on the first twenty minutes: The cut-scenes are well-directed. The camera floats in a way that feels organic. The sound is of excellent mix pedigree. The music is delicious, layered, complex, and yet crisp. The atmosphere, at this shallow depth, exudes a sense of a game that might actually have a destination. Though yeah, it starts with trains and resistance operatives with guns, raging against a city of machines. We've got an aloof cool-person with a sword and a comic relief sidekick. We've seen a baby chocobo pop out of an afro maybe six times already. He's called the little bird "Dad" precisely once.

I am going to play this game, hopefully getting to the point of lost interest. I will be pleasantly surprised if I get on my airplane in eight hours literally burning to know what happens next in the story. Either way, I have Zelda on my DS.

Hey, look, you and me both are going to have to wait to play more Final Fantasy XIII. Maybe you have Zelda, too. You know, March isn't very far away! You guys can do it!

—-

Thanks for reading this. I hope to blow through this game in a couple of days when back in the States and come back at you guys with a larger-than-life review-like not-exactly-a-review article kind of thing. It's the least I can do for you, the good people of the world!

Besides avatars of FFXIII characters, Lightning, Snow and Sazh, there are also items like FFXIII monsters. Available for free until January 14, 2010.

After that initial shipment, another 150,000 copies will be shipped for launch, followed by another 150,000 for the following weekend. A grand total of 1.3 million will be available for purchase during the game's first week in Japan.

By comparison, Square Enix shipped 2 million copies of PlayStation 2 game Final Fantasy XII before the game launched. Of course, the PS3's install base is not quite what the PS2's was.

The Xbox 360 version of FFXIII will not be released in Japan.

平成２１年１２月第３週の新作ゲーム [ゲームの裏話 via Final Fantasy XIII.net]

It features some new gameplay battle footage if you are into that kind of thing. If not, it still features that.

New Final Fantasy XIII "Battle" HD TV Spot - Final Fantasy XIII: News, Trailers & Screens ~ Final Fantasy-XIII.net [Final Fantasy XIII.net]

How I long for the days when I could wander into a video game store and be surprised by the release of a new Final Fantasy game. It hasn't happened since number VII came out on the original PlayStation, but I will remember that day for the rest of my life. Sure, I'm now part of the problem, but I prefer to think of it as sharing my pain with a large group of people.

Square Enix isn't helping, either. Instead of just quietly going back to work on the localization and letting us think about other things, they've now got an official Final Fantasy XIII Facebook page and Twitter account, ensuring that fans never forget that the game is still painfully far away.