Final Fantasy XIII and Versus XIII - new trailers report

Another Square Enix event, and two more trailers appear - both substantially including footage we've seen before. Somehow we're not complaining yet, however, since they both look so interesting and portend very engrossing games.

The Final Fantasy XIII trailer was, in fact, quite different and expanded from prior versions. The story of the game's world became clearer after we had the chance to watch it. The world of FFXIII is broken into two areas: Cocoon, what seems to be a small, closed planet - as the trailer says, "society locked in a small cocoon" - and Pulse, an area below. People in Cocoon live using the power of the Crystals. Technology and magic have merged, as you'll remember if you've read about the game before, and it seems Cocoon uses this power to keep the problems out. However, it's revealed that the people of Cocoon kick out those who don't fit, and force them to go to Pulse. Lightning, the female protagonist of the game we've seen several times, "was chosen to end the world", presumably Cocoon. We now can presume that the hooded prisoners on the train where she fights soldiers are Cocoon citizens being deported to Pulse. A "cruel truth" is hidden by their exile, the trailer explains.

The battle scene didn't show us anything we hadn't seen before, unfortunately, and we're still not sure what's going on there... except that we did notice that Lightning fired off a weapon or attack that caused a bubble of slowed-down time. This would be particularly significant if the game returns to a form of the Active Time Battles we've seen before in most of the series for the past 16 years. We did see a car morph into a monster, which sounds weird (and, hell, is kind of weird) but everybody likes Transformers, so we'll just accept it for now.

The next part of the trailer showcases another character - a blonde-haired male that we know next to nothing about. He also appears to be fighting the soldiers, however, and also summoning Shiva, the female ice spirit from FF (Ifrit, the male fire sprit, shows up elsewhere in the trailer, too.) These two summoned monsters are a blend of magical creatures and machines, and in fact as has been previously reported, Shiva transforms into a motorcycle. Ice pathways are created through the air, and the blonde male travels across them at high speeds, firing what appears to be a bazooka at enemy soldiers who drop into the city from airships, along with mechs.

CATEGORIES
Latest in Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail cinematic screenshot showing Alphinaud Leveilleur, an Elezen boy with short white hair
Final Fantasy 14's funniest speedrunning beef continues as runner who lost a world record to its original champ in just 1 day returns, beats record, is promptly dethroned again
Final Fantasy 7
Sony finally managed to pry Final Fantasy 7 away from Nintendo thanks to a "schmoozer" of a former employee who hung out with Square Enix executives at his parties, according to one former PlayStation boss
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition
Square Enix kills Final Fantasy game's mobile version after being unable to "completely fix" a bug stopping fans from accessing their additional paid content
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster
Final Fantasy creator says the original JRPG's programmer was "like a god" to him: "I still strongly feel that the core program itself is the ‘life’ of a game"
Final Fantasy 14 producer Yoshi-P interview's the series' founding father Hironobu Sakaguchi
After 3 years of playing Final Fantasy 14 "almost every single day," series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi reckons the MMO "might be the game that I've played the most in my life"
Final Fantasy 14 patch 6.4 The Dark Throne
As the Final Fantasy 14 devs "continue to take a firm stance" against mods that can enable harassment, Yoshi-P says improvements are starting in patch 7.2
Latest in News
Balatro
Balatro creator started "properly playing the game myself about a week before launch" and had "a pretty emotional moment" where he realized it's "actually fun"
Death Stranding 2 Collector's Edition
Hideo Kojima reveals Death Stranding 2: On the Beach release date, and the Collector's Edition includes exactly what I predicted it would
Kingmakers
Kingmakers is a strategy game about taking on medieval armies with a gun, but its devs thought the giant mech was too much
The Witcher 3 lead says "not many games" were trying to match the RPG back in 2015, and that meant "there was a risk" to making it in the first place
The Blood of Dawnwalker
The Witcher 3 dev says his new vampire RPG Blood of Dawnwalker wants to challenge genre conventions, but only if "we're changing them to actually achieve some goal"
Daredevil recap: The Defenders
Marvel fans are discussing which of the Netflix series characters would have survived the Blip