PSOneClassics

Just today , in the land of the rising sun, and the birthplace of Playstation, final fantasy 9 was released on the Playstation network. Now this is hardly a surprise seeing how well the other two Final Fantasy games are selling on the network, but one must ask the obvious question when looking at the numbers, why are so many more PSone Classics released on the Japanese PSN, when the bigger market is here in North America?

Also, why doesn’t Europe get hardly any?

This is a little confusing to me to say the least,  and you can see the frustration from gamers every week there is another old, hardly known, and poorly reviewed game released on the network, when so many classics are still absent. Just look at the comments under the store updates on the Playstation Blog, or Kotaku when they report on it.

Obviously Final Fantasy 9 will be released here (and is confirmed), but there are so many games that should be out now so that we can experience them again (or for me, the first time). But we should look at who makes the decisions on when they’ll be released. Capcom last year had their Resident Evil sequels rated by the ESRB, months before they were ever released on the network. They even stated that they didn’t know when they would be released, and after posting a release date, it was delayed. When asked about release dates, Grace Chen of the North American Playstation store said that it’s impossible to have them, because of the rights collecting, and testing of the games.

Now looking at the case with Final Fantasy 9’s release, at least in Japan, there was a date, and it’s been met. On the 7th of May, Square Enix Producer Shinji Hashimoto gave us the date of today, May 20th.  Good to his word, the game is now available.

This is strange that the Japanese Playstation store can be so confident with it’s release dates, while the North American one is so uncertain. But obviously looking at the number of PSOne games on sale in the North American store, it is not difficult to assume that they aren’t doing publishers any favors. Capcom, one of the biggest publishers in the world couldn’t even get the courtesy of a date from them, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem in Japan.

8 of the top 20 highest rated PSone games are now out on the store in North America, while we get games like XS Junior League Dodge Ball as the lone “PSone Classic”  game release (A game, not even reviewed on Metacritic) . There is so much demand for real classics, but it seems like Sony is content to release them at a trickle. Hopefully we’ll get some more news about the state of PSone Classics at E3, which is my bet when they’ll release FF9 on the North American store.

Final Fantasy 9 PSN gets dated (Destructoid.com)

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