We got a huge response from our Final Fantasy XIII-2 unboxing video last month. The biggest question most mainstream gamers had, however, was how the packaging from the Japanese soundtrack releases compared to what’s included with the US collector’s edition. I didn’t think it was necessary to record another complete unboxing video, so I just took a couple quick shots to demonstrate.
While the CE packaging is quite nice, you’ll see that the soundtrack doesn’t get as extravagant as a presentation as with the Japanese releases. The four discs are housed within the same ‘book’ as the game disc, manual, and art book. The game disc is on the left, the soundtrack on the right, with all the other materials in the middle. In terms of track listing, there’s a separate foldout (also pictured above) that lists all the song titles in English.
Let us know what you think of the CE packaging. The idea of making a book out of the whole thing is pretty clever!
Also, hit the jump for another shot of the entire collection in its open configuration.
I own the Limited Edition Japanese XIII-2 Soundtrack and the Limited Edition of XIII-2 (Game) and I’m not a big fan of the former. I’ll never unbox the former. I actually own two Limited Edition Final Fantasy XII soundtracks, one still sealed and the other opened. Most people would call me crazy but oh well,haha.
I just got this on Tuesday, so I’d say it works well.
If you were already planning on owning the game, twenty extra dollars is really a steal for the full soundtrack. I’d rather have the discs than the fancy packaging, to be honest (although I have my CDs and my games in two separate rooms on different floors, so that makes it rather odd to have both in the same case).
Unfortunately, Square-Enix has not updated English data on the discs for us Americans, so all the track names are in Japanese when I ripped them from the disc. So that took a while.
I have to agree with Zachery – including the full four-disc sountrack in the collector’s edition of the game for just $20 more than the price of the game itself is an amazing value, especially compared to the, at least $50 it’d take to import it like I did for all previous games. The packaging for the collector’s edition of the game is actually quite nice as well, in terms of material quality and the like.
Props to Square for finally giving us NA gamers a great bundle. I’d love to see more collector’s editions like this in the future – would save me a bundle on imports.
As for ripping, I just pulled the titles from freedb, so the lack of an English translation didn’t bother me too much. Truth be told, I’d rather the discs be identical, even if that means having Japanese metadata, as it least it also means they didn’t modify or remove anything.
I imported the Original Soundtrack (and game), but I still got the Collector’s Edition of Final Fantasy XIII-2. I was hoping the altered versions of Unseen Intruder and Worlds Collide would be on the CE OST, but they weren’t. I didn’t prefer them over the original songs though, so it wasn’t a big deal.
Definitely looking forward to the Original Soundtrack Plus and future Piano Collection (one can hope).