Final Fantasy XIII will Finally be Here...in March

Last Friday, Square Enix posted a riddle on their site, "A Henchmen Inventor Tent Unto", which was quickly solved to be "ANNOUNCEMENT NOV THIRTEENTH". The announcement we've been waiting for has finally come. Final Fantasy XIII will be released for the Xbox 360 on March 9, 2010. (You can unlock a special Xbox Live item by doing what it says here!) Below is the announcement video that talks with the creators of the game. Getting past the overly dramatic opening with a guy that reminds me of Mulder (seriously it's almost a full minute of this dude blabbing about how great Final Fantasy is. I mean if we didn't know that, then we probably wouldn't care about the release date anyways.), this video shows some pretty cool new battle scenes. It talks about a new battle thing called Paradigm shift. It happens in the middle of the battle and gives the player real-time control. Personally, I like the idea of real-time battles in comparison to the usual turn-based battles of Final Fantasy.

Also, I'm not really sure why, but Sazh is completely ignored as a main character in this video. They show quite a bit of Fang in the battle scenes, who is also listed in the main characters on the FFXIII site; and mention all the other main characters by name though. I'm really excited that they finally announced the release; and that it isn't around next Christmas, like it could have been.

I have seen FFxiii and It is Beautiful!

Video Games | Final Fantasy XIII | TGS 09: Japanese Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

This is the newest trailer for Final Fantasy 13 and it's safe to say that the new gameplay shouldn't disappoint. Now, before you watch the video I will tell you this; the girl making out with Snow is not Lightning. I sat there for about 5 minutes trying to figure out why the girl didn't really look completely like Lightning, but still really resembled her in a weird way. Turns out the girl is Lightning's sister Serah Farron, which should cause some good drama seeing as how Serah looks like she's about 12 and Snow looks more like he's 20-30. I guess it could just be that Snow is so tall that he makes Serah look like a child, since she almost looks slightly younger than Vanille when she stands next to her, but it still kinda creeps me out. Serah is also supposed to be kidnapped our something in order to force Snow and Lightning to team up. There's also a new little boy named Hope Estheim who vaguely reminds me of Titus, except he doesn't seem obnoxious (yet, his voice is definitely not as whiney for sure). He also seems to hangout with Lightning, a lot. There's a nice little clip of him yelling at Snow, which ends with Hope exploding (which I hope is him trying to tell Snow to stop being a pedophile by dating Lightning's little sister lol).

The fight scenes just look awesome, especially once things are summoned. Instead of the summons just having their own specials this time around, it looks like the characters can mount up on them and do a combined special. For instance, Lightning has a sort of angel thing that transforms into a pony, and when she mounts up on it she holds some huge scythes up to kill things with as they charge through them. Sazh has some kind of mechanical summon that transforms into somewhat of a dragster. Sadly, it seems like the special of the dragster is to either swing around and hit monsters of just shoot sparks at it from it's back wheels.

As far as the rest of the trailer goes, I wish there was more Vanille, since the most you really get to see of her is when she's captured with Sazh when she's begging Serah for something (also kinda creeped out by that part), and when she's fighting with Sazh about something (I guess there's more of her than I thought, but still not enough imo). The game finally comes out December 17, for all of the people that actually bought a Playstation 3. As far as I can figure out, the release date for the Xbox 360 will be sometime in Spring 2010.

Vanille is so spunky looking

There's a new Final Fantasy 13 trailer out and the english subbed version is below. If you go to FFXIII's website (which is absolutely amazing btw; be sure to check out the screenshots of all the characters as well as all the other pictures) you'll also notice that all of the character's have now been named, that and there's a new guy joining the crew that wasn't mentioned before. He's black, has a funny little goatee and his name is Sazh Katzroy. In his main picture on the website he's also holding a little yellow chick which is really cute. The man previously known as Mr. 13 cm is called Snow Villiers, which as predicted is a weather-themed name. We already knew that the main girl was named Lightning and that's the only name given for her on the website. The girl with orange pigtails is named Oerba Dia Vanille. That's a seriously crazy name but I guess she is a crazy forest person. I'm sad to say that I couldn't find a translation for the character descriptions on the site yet and I'll be keeping an eye out for it.

Anyway, if you do watch the trailer, (which I highly suggest you do) you'll notice a lot of Lightning and Snow in action. At first I thought the trailer started out with Lightning talking about "the beginning of the end" but then I realized that it's actually Vanille in that weird little robe. I've also come to the conclusion that Snow must be really huge for Vanille to look like a child in comparison when she volunteers to help fight. Sazh doesn't even show up in the trailer as far as I noticed. There is a strange guy that looks like FFX's Wakka and he looks like he's part of Snow's original group as well as another girl with a froofy pirate shirt. It looks like Final Fantasy fans will have to keep waiting for the North American release until 2010 though, since a date for Japanese release hasn't even been given yet and it's supposed to come out this year.