Time for Part 2 of the rather long
Final Fantasy XIII coverage! If you haven't read Part 1 yet,
do so now, particularly for the first of the two videos at the end, which I will talk about at the beginning of this post (aka right now). The full trailer posted will be discussed in amongst other information in the next part of the
Final Fantasy XIII coverage (which I'm hoping will be the last).
First, talking about the live demonstration of the game's opening on
Xbox 360, we can see there appears to be virtually no loss of quality between the
PlayStation 3 (PS3) version of the demo and the video shown at
E3 at the beginning of the month. That said, although I haven't actually talked about the demo here yet, I actually felt that the
Final Fantasy XIII demo didn't actually really push the bar, visually (I'm preparing to be lynched for that, but I honestly don't), and the difference between the quality of the opening pre-rendered cutscene with the shift to in-game immediately afterwards was actually quite huge. Either way, this may explain why there's little to no difference in the quality of the graphics on the 360 in the demo.
Some minor modifications have been made to the input system, including the enemies' names being displayed as menus on the bottom of the screen (in the demo in April you could only choose your enemy via an input cursor onscreen, which sometimes made it difficult to know what you were selecting), as well as odd abbreviations "COM" and "RAV" next to character names. The whole system appears to be labelled "Paradigm", but we're still not entirely sure on why that particular label came up, so we'll try and find out more.
Of course, the major difference between the live demo at E3 and the demo available on the PS3 is the way the player finishes off the first boss. In the live demo, the demonstrator uses his additional bar of ATB (there were only 3 in the import-demo) to perform a summoning sequence with
Lightning, giving the world its first view of
Final Fantasy XIII's
Odin. Immediately from this we see that, when summoned, the
Eidolon (I'm currently using the term as dictated by the E3 portal site) takes over the positions of other party members, though the summoner remains on-screen. Obviously, in the final version of the game, summoning will not be available at this point in the game, but things like that have been included for now so that people can get the full feel of the battle system. The final thing you may notice are the words
Gestalt Mode during the summon performance. We don't know the meaning of this yet (though I've hazarded what is probably a good guess, more on that later...or in another post depending on how big this one gets), except that in German, "Gestalt" means shape or form.
An interview with game director
Motomu Toriyama and producer
Yoshinori Kitase over this demo have also revealed a few more details. The battle system of the version of the game presented at E3 is already a lot more strategic than that which was available to us on the demo that came with
Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete, and that by the time we get to play that same segment again upon release, it'll be even more so (presumably since half the abilities we have in both demos won't be present in the final version of the game). Toriyama also confirmed that
Eidolons are non-exchangeable, and that each particular summon will correspond to a particular character, with the confirmed matchups so far being Lightning and Odin, and
Snow and
Shiva.
Toriyama went on to point out that he's achieved a first in the history of the
Final Fantasy series, and that is revealing the English version of the game so early in development (and for that I thank him). As evident by the two videos in the last post, recording for English character voices is well under way, and Toriyama confided that
lipsynching is being worked so that characters will look as though they're actually saying the words, no matter the language. This is a good step to take, considering it was recently stated there was no way there would be dual English/Japanese audio (although I'm still not sure why people even thought there would be).
Kitase took advantage of this time to tell us that the
Final Fantasy XIII project is currently roughly 60% finished, and that development of the Xbox 360 version is well on schedule. Several weeks after this comment, we actually learned that the Xbox 360 version of the game only began development 2 months before the sequences shown at E3. This is an amazing feat, which just goes to show the power of Square Enix's
Crystal Tools development engine. Toriyama then went a bit further than Kitase, saying that he has personally noticed some differences between the PS3 and 360 versions of the game, but he hopes to reduce these as much as possible before release.
So, time to take a little tiny break from talking in order to show you 20 screenshots of the Xbox 360 version of the game, which give you a clear look at some of the scenes in the game, as well as any modifications made from the PS3 demo earlier this year. I'm unsure as to the original source of these images, but I got them from siteffworld, so I'm thanking them.
So, now we can highlight some of the system a bit better. First of all, a comparison of the battle menu above to the battle menu on the PS3 demo in April. On the earlier demo, the battle menu had the options
Skill,
Black Magic, and
White Magic, with selecting either Skill or Black Magic allowing you access to both of those sections anyway (though White Magic would work completely seperately, without granting you access to other abilities). The new menu unveiled at E3 instead shows
Assault,
Role Abilities/
Repeat,
TP Abilities, and
Items. Assault works as an "auto-fight" option, giving you a set of abilities automatically created for the situation you're currently in (like against
Manasvin, the first boss of the game, it automatically lines up 4
Attack commands). It seems that Role Abilities now regroups all the different menu options from the demo (I'm guessing there'll be different sub-groups, otherwise it'll just get messy). By pressing right on the D-pad whilst highlighting Role Abilities, you'll get the option to "Repeat", which does just what it says on the tin, repeating the last choice. TP Abilities have not been revealed thus far, but in an earlier interview, Motomu Toriyama mentioned that TP was linked to the summons of the game.
However, still linked to TP, the new interface also presents a silverish bar which seems to act as a TP gauge, whilst a new bar above that (green) shows off the character's HP (as opposed to just numbers). When summoned, the selected creature replaces other party members, and the summoning character's TP bar instead becomes the
Gestalt Gauge. It seems that summon-HP automatically reduces whilst they are present on the battlefield, whilst the Gestalt Gauge fills up as they perform abilities. You can select to enter Gestalt Mode (which as I mentioned earlier we don't know yet, but can hazard a guess), which is shown on the Xbox 360 version by pressing the X button on the controller.
Either way, that concludes Part 2 of my
Final Fantasy XIII coverage, and I hope you'll join me soon for Part 3 (I was thinking Part 3 would be the end, but I have a horrible suspicion it'll be at least 4 now).
Final Fantasy XIII is due for a
Japanese release of Winter 2009, with a
Spring 2010 predicted date for both North America and Europe/PAL Territories.
Source:
FF7AC Reunion,
Final Fantasy World, GameTrailers (for the video in the earlier post I talked about)
CD sampler isn't worthwhile when you can get the full soundtrack.
[via Amazon.co.uk]
