As well as the FFXIII-2 details, Famitsu has also interviewed Tetsuya Nomura in their latest issue. He mostly discussed Kingdom Hearts 3D but he did give a few development details on Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

Nomura told Famitsu how he performed a walkthrough of the entire world map recently, checking out the towns and dungeons on the way. He said he was amazed at how wide and impressive everything was. A slightly subjective opinion which isn’t much use to us but he does confirm the use of a new lighting engine. Previously, he stated that the games lighting was being improved and that he was aiming for Versus to be photo realistic. Today he confirmed that an entirely new engine was being used just for it.

The Luminous Engine which was announced back in August is Square Enix’s next generation tool kit and parts of it are being implemented into Versus. The engine does have a small tech demo showing what it can really do (not constrained by specific hardware however). Below is a photo and a screenshot from the tech demo. The left is the photo and the right is the render from the engine. A slightly unfair comparison but it still looks impressive. The 15 second walkthrough video of the scene is available here but only works on some browsers (IE). Youtube however, doesn’t do it justice.

Nomura also says another engine (seperate to Crystal tools) is being utilized for action. The fact that the games engines are still a major talking factor does douse any expectations of an upcoming release. With in-engine trailers already released though, there may have been a lot of work done to what we’ve already seen.