Who thought we’d get some news before Vanafest?

To commemorate the 8th anniversary of Final Fantasy XI, Square Enix is putting out a music “best of” CD for FFXI.  It will be called “Final Fantasy XI 8th Anniversary – Memories of Dusk and Dawn”.  The twist to this new CD is that players will be able to vote for their favorite songs.  You are allowed to vote for 3 tracks from each of the previously released soundtrack albums for FFXI.  Voting will end on March 8th and the CD is scheduled to be released on May 12th for the very reasonable price of 1800 yen.

Please note that if you want to participate in the vote you have to have a Japanese Square Enix Members account.

So far this is only listed on the Japanese PlayOnline site.  We’ll have to wait and see if a similar project is in the works for players in other countries.

Legend of the Southern Isle Coconut (南の島のヤシの実物語) is the 2nd offering for Nobuo Uematsu’s 10 stories project. It’s not on sale yet but people with compatible cell phones in Japan can download a version of the new song in ringtone form.

new single from Uematsu

Uematsu writes that this was the first song he ever wrote back as a young lad in the 6th or 7th grade. The star of the new track is Cococchi (ココッチ). Here’s to hoping it goes on sale on iTunes soon.

A special page with a little preview of the new track can be found here.

About a month ago, Elmer and I posted about the new Star Onions CD called “Sanctuary”. One of the extras that came with buying the actual CD here in Japan was a special code you could enter on the Japanese Square Enix Members site. You would register the code and then get another code later via email to receive a Star Onions T-shirt to be worn by your Square Enix Members site avatar.

The codes for the T-shirts were finally sent out tonight! I went ahead and claimed mine and played around with the avatar system a bit.

The front is a little hard to make out but it says The Star Onions. The back is a little onion character. You can see a better picture of what the character looks like by visiting the special website for the album. I hope they offer more things related to FFXI in the Avatar section.

If you haven’t bought the album yet, you can still purchase it via sites like Amazon.co.jp or Play Asia. If you only want the music, you can find it on iTunes as well. I highly recommend it! By the way, my favorite tracks are “Gustaberg” and “Rapid Onslaught -Assault-”. Elmer likes the dynamic “Fighters of the Crystal”. What’s your favorite track off of the new CD?