Final Fantasy XIII Collector's Edition

The Final Fantasy XIII Collector's Edition on Playstation 3 arrived with the kind of reverence Square Enix reserves for mainline numbered entries. At its core is the Original Sound Selection, a soundtrack CD curated personally by composer Masashi Hamauzu. This isn't a greatest hits compilation pulled from a database. Hamauzu hand-picked the tracks, wrote liner notes for them, and the whole thing ships in a slipcase dressed in FFXIII artwork. When the composer himself decides what you should hear, you listen.

The hardback book, "The World of Final Fantasy XIII," delivers character artwork, CG renders, and environment art spanning the full production. This is the kind of art book that sits between your Amano collections and your strategy guides, a physical record of a game that pushed the PS3's visual capabilities to their limit. The production values here reflect a studio that understood its collector base expected nothing less than premium.

Final Fantasy XIII was polarizing, and we all know it. But the collector's edition exists in a space beyond gameplay debates. It's a document of ambition, of a studio swinging for the fences on new hardware with a new mythology. The physical extras here capture that ambition in a way the game disc alone can't. For Final Fantasy collectors who track every numbered entry across every platform, the PS3 Collector's Edition is a piece of the archive. Love the game or argue about it endlessly, this edition belongs in the library either way.