Although the Final Fantasy XIII demo will be made available to all of us on Thursday, it seems that we’ll all have to wait a long time until we get the chance to play the full game. That is because, for the first time since the game got announced, its release date is now more clear: sometime during December 2009.

The discovery was made by the folks over at 1UP who apparently got their hands on the Japanese demo and finished it, just to find that cool little screen you can see in the image to the left. And that screen means just one thing: Final Fantasy XIII will be released in December 2009. This makes good sense, since most of the big games love the time before Christmas.

So, here we are: we get the FFXIII demo on Thursday and get to play it for an incredible eight months before the full game hits the stores. Hopefully it’s a pretty good demo!