Strange that game data is only 8 GB.

Well, this is actually good news for me. There were rumours that CGI cut scenes were going to become in engine cinemas, on both consoles, but it is clear that is just on Xbox. They will obviously increase compression, as I assume they just wont really bother with it when they have so much space to play with. I, however, do think they might struggle to squeeze it onto 3 discs, especially as you will want to have repeated textures so that you can visit all the locations once you have finished the game, on the same disc

Didn't they say that the 360 version had compressed audio and the PS3 version had uncompressed audio?

Only a 15GB reduction? I highly doubt that anyone will even be able to perceive the difference if the compression was that light.

JRPG is the last genre you bring up when you're complaining about games being too short.

...it's 18 gigs + however much data is repeated on each disc... 18 gigs is 3 360 discs... yeah... light compression.

Or... it's been halved. I never knew cuting something in half was light.

as long as the video on the PS3 version is native 1080p then I'm a happy camper, there just some things that can not be done in gameplay or in game cinematic in order to achieve a certain dramatic or awesome cinematic look.

In any case, the 360 version may actually have DVD quality video which is then upscaled to 1080p if the console is connected to a 1080p TV, which I guess is a fair compromise since it's using DVD anyway.

I would though like to see a side by side comparison of the video, usually in side by side comparisons DVD movies look significantly blurry when compared to blu-ray movies, but since this is CG the difference may not be as big...well in theory anyways.

too much jrpg bashing this days.
you dont want a story? oyu love gameplay? go play mw2. they remove the story and the singleplayer campaing sucks now.

Lossless audio and higher quality pre-rendered cutscenes could easily make up the difference.

(Several PS3 games also utilize data duplication to improve disc read performance, but I doubt FFXIII will be one of them.)

Yeah same here, I was wandering about that too. Im a big Jrpg fan, but still, I have been very critics of most of this gen Jrpg (on 360 and PS3), and I guess that im not alone.  But critics and bashing is not the same thing. Can you tell us more about your observation?