Who else is looking forward to play with Japanese players and practice their language skills? (Or is already playing the beta, though I have no patience for the currently horrific lag)

Maybe if it's not as bad as the beta. Played in the beta, or at least tried to, few weeks ago when the earlier batch went out. Nearly unplayable. Will be fun I hope.

Letting it go unfixed seems unlikely even by SE's standards, I hope. :S

I'll be playing. Should be fun. I don't play the beta, but my brother does and I tried it out for an hour or so earlier tonight. Yeah, there's some problems, but I think it'll work out fine. Still have 2 months yet before it's released. The only Japanese I saw on my short time in the beta was 助けて！！ Even with my abysmal Japanese ability I was able to read it and laughed. Looking forward to not only enjoying the game, but hopefully getting a nice language learning experience out of it

By the way, is the game gonna be playable in any language no matter what disc you have? I tried looking at preorders but all I saw was English editions. Is the JP edition gonna be a separate game or is language support gonna be changeable in the game config? Sorry if it's a stupid question, lol.

I'd imagine that an MMO would be ridiculously helpful in practicing Japanese. I have little to no interest in FF14, however. :/

Slightly off topic, but I wonder why Japan is often skipped over by western MMO devs? Considering the overall popularity of RPGs and (increasingly) MMOs in Japan, I'd think that at the very least, Blizzard would have introduced WoW there, but nnnope. Is it an issue of PC gaming's popularity in Japan (or lack thereof)?

If you buy the English version the UI and NPC dialogue will be in English, but you can still input in Japanese. (unlike FFXI, unless you used addons) I think the servers will be international like the last game, though I can't find a concrete source on that at the moment...

I think the current lag is because of the test servers, not a client issue. Seems to stutter like mad no matter what the PC spec or settings.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad that WoW hasn't taken over Japan and saturated the market there... I could never get into that style of game. I don't get the same feel of adventure in it as I did with FFXI.

Burritolingus Wrote:I'd imagine that an MMO would be ridiculously helpful in practicing Japanese. I have little to no interest in FF14, however. :/

If you have a PS3 already, you can just use Home.

Burritolingus Wrote:Slightly off topic, but I wonder why Japan is often skipped over by western MMO devs? Considering the overall popularity of RPGs and (increasingly) MMOs in Japan, I'd think that at the very least, Blizzard would have introduced WoW there, but nnnope. Is it an issue of PC gaming's popularity in Japan (or lack thereof)?

Because Japanese population is fairly insignificant compared to most regions that do get their own servers. What financial incentive do they have to support such a Japanese version, including translation, tech support, servers and maintenance for Japan's tiny population, when Japanese gamers almost exclusively favour consoles?

If the question is "why does corporation X does/doesn't Y", the answer always is money.