Interviews with Toriyama and Kitase have popped up online with plenty of new details on FFXIII-2 contained within them. Recognition of the negative reaction from gamers to the original title is a key factor in development of the game with the team at Square Enix dedicated to making it more “Player driven”. Here are all the new details divulged by the duo today. There are a lot.

Although FFXIII sold over 6 million units worldwide, the team realised the launch was fairly lackluster with a mixed reaction from gamers and reviewers.

Linearity was the main cause of concern. They decided that for the sequel, all the positive parts of the game would be included or improved upon and the parts which were criticized would absolutely have to be tackled. They knew things had to be changed from the original formula. Toriyama believes with Final Fantasy XIII-2, the franchise is back on track.

Linearity is addressed in multiple ways. The new dialog tree implemented allows player to converse with NPCs with multiple outcomes and they’ll be reducing the amount of cutscenes used to break up the narrative focusing on more interactive storytelling. Standing still at certain locations can trigger dynamic cutscenes but they won’t be stopping you if you want to proceed. They want players to explore and trigger cutscenes by themselves rather than force them upon people. The Live Trigger system gives you multiple ways to tackle your current objective. These can include performing tasks which could for example make an upcoming boss battle easier or even avoid it completely. Branching paths remove the linear corridors you were forced to follow in the original and side quests will finally return including plenty of dungeons to explore. The key theme being introduced into this title is choice and freedom, and that these choices will impact the story. With this comes the startling announcement that FFXIII-2 will contain multiple endings. How many endings are possible hasn’t been revealed yet but it’s still a great departure from what we’ve seen before, even if it has been done countless times in other titles.

Several new gameplay features were revealed yesterday including QTE’s, Mog Clock and the ability to jump and although the battle system remains largely unchanged, there are a few more tweaks. Serah won’t be able to summon Eidolons as she isn’t a l’cie anymore but she can instead call monsters to her aid as a third party member. They refused to go into further detail but it’s apparently much deeper in application than described so far. Another complaint addressed was the lack of plenty of mini-games usually found in Final Fantasy titles. Apparently they will be featured in XIII-2 but no details have been revealed. A re-designed game map will also be included. No details on the leveling system have been given yet. Toriyama also said that they plan to allow you to play the game multiple times but when asked whether this meant a “New Game +” type system with characters experience and items carried over, he said they preferred to offer an alternative system to that.

Talking about development, Kitase stated that they wanted to add much more

content to the game that would be worthy of it’s predecessor. He was disappointed by the decision to not release DLC for FFXIII but XIII-2 is designed to expand the universe so DLC has been planned from the beginning of development. Toriyama says they can’t confirm how many DLC packs could be made available. Kitase also made sure to add that development of XIII-2 hadn’t impacted on the development of Final Fantasy Versus XIII in any way. Finally, when Kitase was asked whether the game could appear on Nintendo’s new Wii U console, he said that they’re looking into the format but currently XIII-2 will be limited to PS3 and Xbox 360.