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.