Square Enix released their latest trailer for Final Fantasy XIII at this year’s Tokyo game show. And it’s bloody epic. We’ve got love, heart attack, conflict, pain, talks of death, mecha’s, magic and a warblicious Japanese ballad plying all the while. If you didn’t want this game up until this point, you will after having watched this.

Maybe it’s just me, but Serah looks a little underage for big ol’ manly Snow. Him being a pedophile would definitely be a new angle for a Final Fantasy game. It’s probably a case of Serah having that typically high, little girl voice that many young vulnerable girls get given in Japanese animations which causes them to sound younger than they actually are. Pair this with a dress sense which looks of that of a 14 year old girl, and it’s understandable why characters such as Serah come off like they’ve not even hit 16. It’s possibly an un-written (or likely written) rule in the Japanese animation industry to project a form of innocence and naivety from a female character.

It’s a shame that Serah and Snow are the games’ couple. I was always under the impression that we’d see Snow and Lightning have a love / hate relationship that’d eventually come full circle and lead to some ‘relations’ – which I liked the idea of. It’d be wicked if Lightning and Snow had an affair, Serah went off of the rails at the revelation, died and then Lightning and Snow were made to live with that guilt for the rest of their lives. That’d be some dark shit I could go for.

Final Fantasy XIII‘s plot is looking like a good ‘un. Every character seems to have some form of personal conflict, which clashes with another character. Vanille thinking dying will fix everything and having a difference of opinion on being an I’Cie to Sazh. Lightning giving up her adolescence at the expense of her relationship with Serah. Snow fighting hard to protect Serah and prove himself to Lightning. Serah being torn between Lightning, Snow and the burden of becoming an I’Cie. Hope holding resentment towards Snow for the death of his mother and trying to keep his relationship with his father intact, whilst also confiding in Lightning. And Sazh having to protect Dajh – who seems is an I’Cie purely as a result of being Sazh’s son. I’m liking the character set-up’s a great deal at this early stage. There is potential for a great story to be told here. I just hope Square Enix don’t f**k it all up, which they could still end up doing. It’s easy to edit a trailer to make a game look like it will have the best rollercoaster ride of a story ever. Resident evil 5 comes to mind. Trailers for that game had me thinking it would tell some big epic story. Then the game releases and the only epic aspect of the story was the fail.

The summons are look spectacular as they always do. I’m not sure why Square Enix went for this new mecha style for them though. One wonders if every Eidolon is going to become some form of vehicle. Siren was shown looking beautiful and enchanting in an early screenshot of the game. What’s Square Enix going to do with her? Have her looking beautifully feminine whilst playing her harp on a still lake of water as feathers float around her, just to transform into a 4×4 quad bike with missile launchers and spiked tyres?! Hopefully the Eidolon’s will play a bigger role in battles and feel needed and somewhat depended upon; as they did in Final Fantasy X, and completely unlike how they did in Final Fantasy XII. I only used the summons in XII just to see what they looked like. Other than that, I didn’t see the point in using them. They were useless. Not to mention unmemorable.

I’m sure I’m not the only who has noticed. But aspects of Final Fantasy XIII are looking a heck of a lot like X. A couple of the locations in the game looked like dead ringers for Zanarkand (pre Sin attack) and Besaid island. When Serah was standing on the board walk, I was expecting Yuna to walk onto the water and do her little dance. And when Serah and Snow had their moment on the hover bike amidst the fireworks, I expected Tidus to jump out of the water and Jecht shot Snow in the face.

I’m mad at myself for letting this game build me up. Because I know Square Enix like to build up a fans’ hopes, hold their fragility in the palm of their hands, and then drop you and smash your shit to pieces when the game releases and you find out it plays like a piece of shit.

It’s a shame there’ll be no option to switch to the Japanese voice track. I’m shocked the PS3 version won’t feature it. Wasn’t shit like this one of the many purposes of Blu-ray? As cool as the English voices sound, it’d be nice to have the Japanese ones too. Everything seems much more dramatic in Japanese. Especially when people start shouting shit. I’m in love with how bad ass Lightning sounds in Japanese, and am not mentally prepared for how annoying Serah is going to sound in English. I just know she’s going to have an English voice that is so jarring that it’ll make me pray to the Fal’Cie that she dies.