As promised last week, Tetsuya Nomura has released new details on Final Fantasy Versus XIII in the form of a short interview with Famitsu in their latest issue. Unfortunately, a lot of the new information given is difficult to understand without actually seeing what Nomura is talking about or the screenshots he showed the editors but that didn’t stop him.

Cutscenes were a major topic in the interview. Final Fantasy has always had cutscenes in 3 flavours. CG, pre-rendered and real-time. Historically, they’ve never been controllable but Nomura wants to end that. He says that all real-time cutscenes in Versus will be controllable  in order to keep the game from stopping. How it’s been implemented it is unclear but we can assume it could possibly involve NPCs talking while the character you’re controlling is still able to explore. If that’s the case, it doesn’t sound incredibly revolutionary but we’ll have to wait and see.

Nomura goes into more depth about cutscenes, this time concerning facial expressions which he claims will be much more natural, unlike the “game-like” expressions of past games. Although what he means is unclear, he also mentions a new system in that area which he thinks hasn’t been done before. We’ll have to wait to see what he means.

Three screenshots were shown to the editors, all in real-time, and all apparently stunning. They include shots of an Italian like city, an afternoon shot of a highway, and the same but at night. Nomura says the real-time looks so good because the low quality and high quality models are almost identical, apart from the hair which is slightly better looking on the pre-rendered models. Takeshi Nozue is responsible for the near pre-rendered look of the real-time shots thanks to his knowledge on lighting and other pre-rendered tricks. While the editors noted that the screenshots looked like photos, Nomura also said that you can take photos in-game with Noctis’ cellphone. The screenshots won’t be available to the public yet but when they are, he says they’ll look even better thanks to an improvement in the lighting technology.

Concerning development itself, Nomura says that they’re preparing to enter full production. Voice acting is being slowly recorded now so hopefully our next trailer could be fully voiced.

Source: Andriasang