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D’ya know that Australian sounding chick in the last epic to the eye balls trailer of Final Fantasy XIII? Well, she goes by the name of Oerba Yun Fang. And as you can see, Oerba is a bit of a looker. Sexy in a mysteriously exotic kinda way. But the name is a weird one. It sounds like a Korean delicacy! I honestly would’ve preferred her name to have been Oerba Kimchee (seeing as I touched on the subject of Korean delicacies and all). Her name certainly gives licence for Final Fantasy XIII’s black dude Sazh to drop a corny line like “So, your name’s Oerba Yun Fang? Woooo, you a young thang!” and then give a reassuring look to himself like he just dropped the funniest and slickest line ever. I actually wouldn’t mind that…

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I was pretty shocked when I first checked out the playable demo of this game. Because what I had previously thought was the main theme to the game, turned out to be the battle theme!

It’s definitely a departure for the Final Fantasy series in terms of it’s sound. You’d never have thought when you first heard the piece play in the trailer a couple of years back that it’d get chucked into the game as a battle theme.

I love the composition. I did from day one. It’s grand. It’s catchy and brilliantly arranged. It really does convey the feeling of being part of a big epic adventure. But as a battle theme!? I’m not too sure. It has a sound about it that I wouldn’t necessarily associate with a battle theme. It’s sound fits, yet doesn’t at the same time: in a good and bad way. Plus, hearing it every single time you fight a battle throughout the game – it would get annoying and wear thin after a while. I’m hoping Square Enix either re-arrange it to keep it in line with other Final Fantasy battle themes and feature more of a kick, or that they’ll have different battle themes for different locations and situations.

But I do love it though. It’s a great piece of music. The sound, the sweeping strings, the mix of edgy guitars with operatic style strings and brass sections. It’s hard not to like it for what it is: a stunning bit of music. Although for a game that Square Enix claimed would not be your typical, pigeon holed J-RPG, they gave the game a very Japanesey style battle theme. All its missing is a koto and a shakuhachi.

Listen: Battle theme

Composed by Masashi Hamauzu
Final Fantasy XIII
© 2008, 2009 Square Enix

For the mp3 players: Battle theme

Square Enix have gone on the record to say that Final Fantasy XIII will not be a typical J-RPG and that it will straddle genre’s. Game producer Yoshinori Kitase said…

“There’s a trend these days to strictly categorize games as western RPGs or Japanese RPGs, but Final Fantasy is something that we don’t try to categorize as either, or. For us, the game straddles genre’s”.

If Final Fantasy XIII isn’t a J-RPG, then Princess Peach is black and from Kijuju. We all know full well Final Fantasy XIII will feature a theme song sung by a female J-Pop artist, complete with warbilicious vocals. That there will be magic. There will be a love interest that will never fully come to fruition. There will be a kakkoii boy or two. There’ll be a girl with big eyes, pig tails, mini skirts and boots. Some Mecha’s. A couple dozen beasts. Bahamut. And shit loads of FMV. Shoot, with seen 90% of this stuff in trailers! Of course it’s a J-RPG!! Final Fantasy had continued to pretty much define a J-RPG all by itself.

I know games developers in Japan are currently feeling the crunch to lob loads of western appeal into their games. But there’s nothing wrong with a full on, unashamed Japanesey title. I just hope Square don’t bastardize Final Fantasy further than they have up until now. Although given the hash job they’ve made of the series so far, there’s not much more Square can do to make things any worse. (Although I wouldn’t put it past them!) And no matter what they do, whether the end results are good or bad – Square Enix will rack a shit loads of sales, a broken record or two and commercial success. With XIII releasing on 2 successful platforms this is already guaranteed. Square’s so called straddling genre’s and injection of western influences is probably making the lead main character a white female and chucking in a black guy with a gun and an afro. I hope it ends there. The last thing I want is for Square to try and deviate too much and ruin the game as a result.

The problem with Final Fantasy has never been it’s never been western enough. It’s been that Square seem to have lost sight of what made the games so good originally. I just hope that Final Fantasy fans do not end up greatly disappointed. This could easily go the Resident evil 5 route: a game which sells loads, gets decent reviews across the board, but ultimately ends up a game that falls really short. Although XIII has something in its favour and one less burden that Capcom had: the game that came before it wasn’t all that brilliant, and can easily be bettered.

[CVG]

With Final Fantasy: Advent children complete now out in Japan, the first playable demo of Final Fantasy XIII is also out and about. As is the way in this new age of embeddable videos – Japanese gamers, importers and owners of hacked PS3’s and bit torrent software have done us a favour and uploaded videos of the demo being played through! You can peep a sneak peak at a section of the demo below…

The game is looking great! But it always did and was always going to.  I mean, c’mon: It’s Square Enix! You can always rely on them to push some stunning visuals out of a console when it comes to their big releases. Whilst the differences between the FMV and in-game engine graphics is easily distinguishable. There’s no denying how good the graphics are. Although after the graphical marvels that are Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident evil 5, Final Fantasy XIII isn’t looking leaps and bounds above what we’ve seen on platforms already. Although I’m sure there are some visual marvels to be witnessed, particularly where summons and magic spells are concerned.

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Shots of this trailer were released yonks ago. God knows why it took so long for Square Enix to release it officially. Did this trailer do anything for you? Because it didn’t do a thing for me. This trailer doesn’t reveal anything more about the game than the E3 2008 trailer did. From this trailer it’s pretty much certain that the gunblade wielding hottie, the dude in the beanie hat and the red haired girl are allies, but we gathered this from before – it’s old news now. We knew we were going to get summons, we knew there’d be lots of robots, we knew there’d be lots of FMV. So what exactly new stuff did this trailer show? Nothing. What more do we know about the plot? Nothing. The game looks stunning graphically, but what’s new? It’s a given that any game Square Enix produce is going to look the business and they’ve got a lot of processing power to mess around with this generation.

Final Fantasy has fallen off big time. I say the series started to fall off from VII onwards, and some would say VI. Square Enix need to start putting more effort into the game play and the story of their Final Fantasy games. Good graphics can only have a gamer sprung for so long; and once this ‘wow’ factor wears off there needs to be solid gameplay and a tight story to keep gamers enthralled until the end. No 20 minute summoning sequence which features every particle effect under the sun and high action FMV sequence will be able to compensate for the fundamental short comings. I thought Final Fantasy XII was bloody awful. The graphics were brilliant, way more than I expected the PS2 to deliver; but it was boring to play and the story was crap, and the graphics meant jack shit once I came to these realizations.

I hope Final Fantasy XIII turns out to be a good game. It honestly doesn’t have to be, because it will break sales records regardless. But for all of the FF fans, the PS3 and Xbox 360 owning RPG lovers: I hope the game is solid and a return to form. Square do need to step their game up though, because there are several decent RPG’s releasing across all formats over the course of next year. PS3 owners already have an RPG masterpiece in the form of Valkyria chronicles, a game which got me excited in a way XIII didn’t and hasn’t as of yet.

New screenshots of Final Fantasy XIII have surfaced!! It was previously revealed yonks ago that our agile new heroine would become part of your typical FF style party, and that it was highly likely that the red haired girl and the Seifer look-a-like in the hat would be part of it. And whilst these screenshots don’t really confirm that, they actually kinda do. The shots above show our little party spending quality time together in much more rural settings as opposed to the high tech cities we’ve seen up until now. The shot on the top right is especially striking; showing a colossal figure amidst tidal waves which appear to have frozen.

Square Enix are still keeping tight lipped about anything concerning this games’ plot and its characters, which is just how I like it! There’s nothing worse than knowing everything about a game way before it’s even released.

As we speak, there’s a bunch of Square Enix employees working their fingers to the bone to get this game completed, along with a bunch of other Final Fantasy related games on the side. Oh yeah, and the forthcoming Xbox 360 port of this game as well.

A playable demo of Final Fantasy XIII will be made available with Final Fantasy VII: Advent children complete when it releases in Japan in March 2009. There’s no word on if this demo will be made available for download on the PSN marketplace.

Watch it: Final Fantasy XIII E3 2008 trailer
Read about it: Fabula nova crystallis: Final Fantasy

[Famitsu]

NZone has stated that a PC version of Final Fantasy XIII is already in the works, utilizing the new Crystal Tools development environment, which makes it possible for game developers to create cross-platform games. It’s still unclear if this port will be for both Japanese AND English versions, or just one or the other. While this might be yet another reason to NOT buy a PS3, this particular news piece should be taken with a grain of salt as they also mentioned that FFXII is an online game and was released for the XBox 360, though I’m inclined to think that it’s just an honest typo error on NZone’s part.

Confirmation on this bit of information will probably be done by Square-Enix sooner, rather than later, and we will be on the lookout for that, so stay tuned folks!

[NZone]

Another game gone multi format and one less reason to buy a PS3. News of the Xbox 360 release either shocked you downright or didn’t surprise you at all given the slew of high profile titles that were once Sony exclusive getting simultaneous releases on the Xbox 360. I fell into the shocked downright camp as I never thought I’d see the day Square Enix would release a new entry into the main Final Fantasy series on a console other than Sony’s.

Not much more information has been disclosed about this game other than it’s release for the Xbox 360 and the inclusion of a new ‘overclock system’ which will allow players to slow down time around them and lay the smackdown on enemies. Rumor has it this will replace the Limit break / Overdrive system. It’s unknown whether this slow down ability will be available to all party members in battle or if it’s exclusive to Lightning and other characters will be given other abilities or forms of attacks.

You can check out a run down of all the information on Final Fantasy XIII revealed up until now here.

Not much is shown that we haven’t seen before, but that said the game looks incredibly slick and I’m digging the funky Uematsu’s composed theme song. As with Versus XIII’s trailer, I’m getting a sense of d�j� vu. Final Fantasy XII stunk of Star Wars and it seems XIII will too. And the whole flipping in the air whilst shooting a pistol gives me flashbacks of Yuna in Final Fantasy X-2. The difference being that XIII’s leading lady looks a heck of alot cooler, not so girly and appears to be a heck of alot more capable. It’s good to have a kick arse female in a Final Fantasy game. There hasn’t been one in an FF game since Tifa in VII. Though she lost major cool points after hanging up the mini skirt and getting punk’d like a bitch in Advent children. (How she lost that fight is still a mystery to me…)

Square Enix has said that their aim with Final Fantasy XIII is to have in game battles that rival the pace and intensity of those in Advent children. If anybody can pull that off it’s Square Enix and the PS3 is more than capable of handling it. But the mind boggles as to how the battles system is going to work. My guess is that the battle system will be some offshoot of Final Fantasy XII’s and that those really cool moves shown in the trailer above are triggered set pieces. Kinda like how the triangle command worked in Kingdom Hearts II. But that’s just a complete hunch.

Of the 3 titles that make up Fabula nova crystallis: Final Fantasy, this will release first. There’s no release date, but my guess is that Japan will see it at Christmas of 2008, whilst North America and Europe are made to sit tight until 2009. I doubt very much neither of the Final Fantasy games are close to completion. With the amount of games Square Enix have in development right now it’s a wonder how they get anything completed at all. I bet Square Enix employees haven’t seen their families since the release of Final Fantasy VII.

[JeuxFrance]

Square Enix chose to keep trailers of their forthcoming Final Fantasy XIII and Kingdom Hearts games private at this year’s Tokyo game show. I doubt anybody cared. I sure as hell didn’t. But an extended trailer for Final Fantasy versus XIII has now been released. By released I mean ripped from a DVD. Some bonus DVD got released in Japan and this trailer was on it. So of course it got ripped and uploaded to the Internets. Thank God for the Internet and embeddable videos!

As is always with Square Enix, the quality of the FMV is astounding from a visual standpoint. But I couldn’t help but think “Meh” as I watched this. There’s a resounding sense of deja vu about the whole thing. The main guy looks like a member of Kingdom Hearts II’s Organization XIII and the scene itself easily could’ve been a deleted one from Advent children. It probably was and then Square Enix decided to spin it off into another game.

For those who don’t know, Final Fantasy versus XIII is one of three Final Fantasy XIII games which will collectively form Fabula nova crystallis, which translates roughly as Tale of the new crystal. Final Fantasy XIII is the main game and some mobile phone bullshit is the other. All 3 of these games are set in their own universes, but are unified by their central themes, which I’m assuming will be a crystal and a love interest.

Final Fantasy Versus XIII is being directed by Advent children and Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya ‘I make men look effeminate and draw kids with huge feet’ Nomura. This of course means Versus XIII will have FMV sequence and cut scenes that look like they were jacked straight out of Advent children and the game will play just like Kingdom Hearts II and probably feature Bahamut and a character named Cid for good measure.

Despite my cynicism, I’m looking forward to this game. I just find it hard to get excited about it when Square Enix’s past few efforts have been so lackluster, there is such little information on this game, the scene above looks so unoriginal and the game probably won’t release in North America or Europe until 2009.

[JeuxFrance]