More images have surfaced from Thursday’s Famitsu, this time from the magazine’s Final Fantasy XIII article. Nothing to get too excited about, since it’s mainly just rehasing Lieutenant Colonel’s Rosch and Nabaat, as well as Odin’s Gestalt form and Driving Mode commands.

Thanks to forum member des for the heads up.
Source

IGN have written up a rather large and extensive preview of Final Fantasy XIII while at Gamescom.

To summarise, IGN got to sit down with director Motomu Toriyama and producer Yoshinori Kitase to watch a brief demo of FFXIII which appears to include new content. They were shown what’s called the “Paradigm Shift system” which allows the player to change their stance in order to suit the current situation. Settings in this mode include Overwhelm, Aggression and Peacemaker which all have various advantages in a certain situation. The idea of this system is to add more a more strategical element to the gameplay rather than just mashing the same combos over and over.

As well as general combat, Kitase also showed some summoning which included Shiva, of course, and Lightning summoning Odin which this time included her using him in his Gestalt mode as a horse. Apparently this mode ramps up the battle pacing quite a bit.

After the demo, IGN quizzed Toriyama and Kitase on a number of things including dual voice acting (which will not be included) and expanded slightly on the game’s setting, but they didn’t reveal anything new. They did, however, confirm Klee Kuo’s earlier reveal of a new, young female character who is apparently very “cute”, and a second character who is Sazh’s son.

Fans will be glad to know that the English voice acting which premiered at E3 2009 has now been completed, the development on the Western version is now going on as the Japanese version comes to a close. As well as this, they both announced that the lip sync and facial animations will both be redone to suit the english voices, which is great news and surely a first for Final Fantasy.

Source (& full preview): IGN

Thanks, Eight88EightEntertainment.

Our new friend over at Square-Enix has revealed over his twitter some interesting facts about Final Fantasy XIII. Klee Kuo says that Sazh has a son and there’s a new female character who is yet to be revealed. He later posted in another twitter that the new female characters name has been mentioned in past trailers. This almost certainly means that the new girl is Serah who we’ve heard mentioned before but never seen.

Source: Klee Kuo @Twitter

At Gamescom today, Final Fantasy XIII’s producer Yoshinori Kitase confirmed that the game will be arriving in both Europe and America in Spring 2010 making it one of the shortest gaps between the regions for the release of any numbered title so far. He also confirms that both the English and Japanese dub will be the only languages available for the final game with subtitles available in your native language.

In an interview with 1up, Kitase says that the Playstation 3 version is 90% complete so far with the Xbox 360 version being 70% complete. The game is reported to be running well on Microsoft’s hardware but they haven’t began the debugging process.

Although we expected something yesterday, Square have decided to wait until today to reveal all the new details for Final Fantasy XIII. The interview with Toriyama and Kitase was conducted by NowGamer and does provide a few new details and development updates to tide us over for now.

Can you talk about the personalities of the two protagonists, Snow and Lightning, in Final Fantasy XIII?
Motomu Toriyama: Lightning has a very cool personality. Snow, meanwhile is a little on the hot side, he’s very passionate about things and outspoken, so a lot of the exchanges between these characters has them not meeting eye-to-eye. A lot of the time, Lightning becomes annoyed because Snow is too passionate about certain things, so the way these two characters interact is going to be very entertaining for the players.

Were they designed to be opposites to increase the level of drama on-display?
MT: That was the original concept.

A lot of people on the Internet assume that Lighting is almost a female version of Cloud, from Final Fantasy VII – how true is this, really?
MT: The only two basic similarities are that they’re cool characters and have an ex-military [background]. Other than that, there’s no real connection between the two characters. Lightning really is her own person.

How do you think Final Fantasy XIII will affect the Japanese mentality towards RPG design?
Yoshinori Kitase: Japanese RPGs have traditionally always been command-based, and it’s all about really taking your time to strategise and work your way through the battles. That’s really what Final Fantasy has been as a series, but in XIII [there’s] more action. It’s still a command-based RPG at its core, but there’s a lot more speed, a lot more action – this might be the first step for the Final Fantasy series or Japanese RPGs as a whole to move out of the tradition solely command-based system into a more action-based system.

Final Fantasy games have always taken about a year to be translated for Europe – have you improved the process, this time?
YK: The development for the Japanese and European versions of the game are moving along, side-by-side, as the voice acting and subtitles are complete. Usually, we’d release the Japanese version and then begin localisation, meaning there was a big gap between the two releases, but we’ve announced Winter for the Japanese release and for North America and Europe, we’re targeting Spring, so it could be anything from a six-month gap to as small as a three-month gap. We’ll be bringing it to worldwide audiences much quicker than previous titles.

Is accelerating the localisation process key to making XIII a success, then?
YK: We definitely consider it important to decrease that gap. For Final Fantasy X, for example, players were scolding us for making it late. It’s definitely something we were looking into. We wanted to get the game out to overseas audiences as soon as possible.

The summon creatures are often based on religious figures – Shiva, for example – yet they appear very different to their recognised forms. What research goes into the summons?
YK: It’s been a while since these summons were created, so we don’t go back to the original mythology and consider that, it’s become more about – because these summons reappear in Final Fantasy titles – how to design them so it’s a fresh experience for the player. Shiva, for example, is mentioned in the original mythology as a male, but now, beyond gender, she turns into a bike in Final Fantasy XIII.

What impact do you think the game will have on Xbox 360?
YK: Our whole point was to reach out to as many fans as possible. Knowing that the 360 has a large worldwide audience, our goal was to reach out to them, as well. We hope the users will enjoy Final Fantasy.

How will Final Fantasy XIII let you customise characters and weapons in the game?
MT: Just like there was the Sphere Grid in Final Fantasy X and the Licence Board in Final Fantasy XII, XIII has its own unique levelling-up system for the character. That information we haven’t really revealed in Japan, yet, but we will be revealing it in the Fall. And weapons, there’ll be some big customisation options available.

How is the pacing in Final Fantasy XIII? Were you ever conscious of Western RPGs in this regard?
MT: We weren’t necessarily affected directly by Western games. The aim of the Final Fantasy team was to make it as seamless as possible, to provide good pacing for the game, so I think we’ve been able to achieve that with XIII.

Is there any particular template you use for creating villains in Final Fantasy?
YK: For the enemy characters, we’re always careful to just create bad guys that aren’t all evil, that have their own motivations and beliefs over what their actions are. There’s no complete sense of evil, but everyone has their own way of thinking. That’s something that’s really important to designing the enemy characters.

What’s the size of the game world in XIII?
MT: The scale is similar to Final Fantasy X, in terms of world size, but in terms of the environments – we’ve only been showing a lot of the cityscapes and futuristic backgrounds, but that’s just in Cocoon. Within Cocoon, there’s also a lot of wilderness and natural forests. Outside of Coon, there’s the whole wilderness of Pulse, that’s all natural environments. There’s a lot of variety.

What lessons have you learned from recent Final Fantasy games like XII and FFVII spin-off Crisis Core?
YK: We did look to past Final Fantasy titles, like XII, not so much taking in ideas from past titles and putting them into XIII, but more looking at them and seeing what we could do differently. In the case of FFXII and XIII, you see a paradigm shift, actually changing the player’s role in the battle. In XII you do all of the role assigning before the battle, and being able to change everything during the battle is more exciting in our eyes.
MT: In Final Fantasy XII, it was seamless and realistic where you go into battle and it’s not so different from the field scenes. For me, whenever I work on a Final Fantasy title, I really want to have eye-catching visual effects and [make] the action really big. The field and battle [transition] is a little different.

Do you see DLC playing any role in the game?
YK: There are no firm plans for DLC, at the moment, but we’re looking at it and considering it. We’d like to provide additional maps and boss characters, but nothing is set in stone, yet.

Given Final Fantasy VII’s success after the PSN re-release, does this make you confident about the success of XIII?
YK: It’d definitely been a while since the last Final Fantasy was released, so with the success, as you mention, we were able to see that there were people out there waiting for the next Final Fantasy to come out and make us work extra hard for when [XIII] comes out.

Thanks to our forum member Yellow for finding the interview.

Source: NowGamer

Speaking to VG247 this morning, Kitase commented on the Xbox 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII confirming that it will, obviously, ship on multiple discs. The amount is undecided, but he said that the team is aiming to ship it on three DVD discs, which isn’t too bad, though he did note that this would not be the final count.

“The 360 version and the PS3 version should be pretty much equal, both in terms of content and the visuals as well”, he also added.

“Since the hardware is different, there might be some subtle differences if you compare screenshots side by side, but the team

V-Jump, who named Yaag in their latest issue are ready to reveal the name of another Final Fantasy XIII character. This time it’s the glasses wearing, long haired woman who appears in the latest trailers. V-Jump will be doing a feature on her in their new issue but they’ve already revealed that her name will be Jill Nabato (loosely translated, may change slightly) and that she’s a Lieutenant Colonel in the holy government. She’s also been confirmed to be a “nemesis” so there’s no surprises there.

Update: Our staff member Shuyu has found the Shonen Jump scan confirming it:

Source: FF7AC Reunion

The latest issue of V-Jump has been leaked with more Final Fantasy XIII information this week. The photos aren’t very clear but they do show for the first time Odin in Gestalt mode in some in-game screenshots. The new issue of Famitsu is set to be released on August 27th so more scans are sure to come soon and we’ll update you when they do.

Thanks to our forum member des for finding the images.