TOKYO – Square Enix showed new footage of the long-awaited Final Fantasy XIII spinoffs in its closed theater on the Tokyo Game Show floor this weekend.
Announced in 2006 alongside the main game, the PSP game Final Fantasy Agito XIII (pictured) and the PlayStation 3 title Final Fantasy Versus XIII have not been shown in playable form in the ensuing four and a half years. Both are action role-playing games.
The games' presence at this year's Tokyo Game Show was limited to trailers that were not shown in public. As usual with Square Enix's trade show booths, a curtained-off area played 20 minutes' worth of trailers every half hour throughout the day to groups of attendees, also featuring new footage of other upcoming titles like Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded and Dissidia Duodecim Final Fantasy. Photography was strictly prohibited.
Although the trailers for Agito and Versus did not list release dates for either game, the presentation closed with a news announcement: A conference about the Final Fantasy XIII game series will be held in Japan on January 11, 2011. This is when we should get some solid details about when these games will actually be released.
A full report on what games were shown in the closed theater follows.
1. Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded – Playable on the show floor, this is a Nintendo DS remake of the mobile Kingdom Hearts game using the engine from the last DS game. The trailer showed off the avatar creation mode, in which users can create their own cutesy Kingdom Hearts avatars and use them in the game's network mode. Available October 7 in Japan.
2. Kingdom Hearts Mobile – Hey, did you know there's a Kingdom Hearts mobile app? They only show footage of it every year. It's been out forever!
3. Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep Final Mix – A version of the PSP game with English voices and other minor tweaks. Available January 11 in Japan.
4. The 3rd Birthday – PSP sequel to Parasite Eve, a third-person shooter with a whole lot of storyline. December 22 in Japan.
5. Dissidia Duodecim Final Fantasy – The sequel to the Final Fantasy fighting game for the PSP. New characters include Lightning from XIII, Kain from IV and Tifa from VII. Out in spring 2011 in Japan.
6. Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy XIII – Here's the big one. These two trailers were grouped together under the umbrella name for the XIII series. Agito's looking quite the same as it always has – it's a melee-focused action RPG for PSP, with screens full of great big monsters to battle. The best part was the footage of the characters riding around on a world map with Chocobos.
Finally, very small bits of Final Fantasy Versus XIII's gameplay were shown. We first saw the main character running around a destroyed modern world – two-lane highways cracked in half, a burned-out gas station – with no one else around him. After an all-too-brief glimpse of that, we saw an action sequence with him slashing a massive Behemoth.
I have to be careful about reading too much into a few snippets of gameplay footage of unknown provenance, but Versus is a good-looking game. I'm interested to finally see what it's like, hopefully at this January conference.
Image courtesy Square Enix
