You're reading an E3 2009 preview, which we've broken into three sections to make it easy to sift through during this week of convention madness. Check out E3.1UP.COM for all (meaning words, screens, and videos) of our E3 2009 coverage.
What's the game about? Square Enix is getting maximum mileage out of its next really, really big game: not only was it a hot exclusive for Sony in Japan (in the form of a playable PS3 demo attached to the release of Advent Children: Complete on Blu-ray), it was also a big smash for Microsoft yesterday here at E3 (with the first English footage of the game appearing as an Xbox 360 demo). By all accounts, both the 360 and U.S. versions of the game are in their most rudimentary forms; even so, producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Motomu Toriyama were on hand to demonstrate a few brief moments of English-language gameplay behind closed doors at the show.
What's new for E3? Besides the obvious language changes from the Japanese demo, the E3 build of FFXIII adds a great deal to the previous public release's rather rudimentary combat system and mechanics. While the E3 version still features trenchcoated brawler Snow as its sole playable character (accompanied by his poster peers Lightning and Vanille), the young pugilist has many more options available to him in the heat of battle now. In addition to a number of new spells (including the mysterious Ruin and Ruinaga), he was also able to summon the eidolon Shiva.
Click the image above to check out all Final Fantasy XIII screens.
The FFXIII take on the series' ice goddess is quite unusual: Shiva's actually two women. Summoning them causes them to replace Snow's companions, similar to the summoned allies of Final Fantasy X and XII. As in the prior demo, only Snow is directly controlled by the player, so the Shivas are completely AI-controlled and perform both attack and healing functions. Weirdly, Shiva can transform into a motorcycle that Snow can ride into bad guys.
Although he wouldn't explain quite how he triggered it, Toriyama used the goddesses' bike mode to trigger something called Gestalt, which is being presented as a new take on Limit Breaks. By activating Gestalt, Snow is able input special commands -- mostly combination's of X and a directional button -- to cause the bike to perform various action-oriented attacks. It's not entirely dissimilar from, say, Zell's Limit Breaks in Final Fantasy VIII.
Unfortunately, much of how Gestalts work remains opaque. The developers will say that each character can only wield a single eidolon at a time (again, similar to FFVIII's Guardian Forces) and that Gestalts are a unique expression of a character's relationship with an eidolon. This suggests that each eidolon will require different types of inputs to activate their specific Gestalt, further inviting comparisons to the Limit Break feature. (For his part, Toriyama acknowledges that the two concepts are closely related.)
Click the image above to check out all Final Fantasy XIII screens.
We were also able to pry other small tidbits about the game's more mysterious mechanics from the dev team as well. For example, the rankings after each battle are somehow connected to the as-yet undisclosed character-building system (think FFX's Sphere Grid or FFXII's License Board). And while FFXIII won't incorporate an analogue to the Gambit system, which allowed FFXII's party AI to be defined outside of battle, there will be some sort of dynamic, on-the-fly AI adjustment ability during battle... though Toriyama admits this is still being balanced and fine-tuned.
What's our take? Without question, FFXIII is the biggest Japanese RPG this generation and probably even eclipses Mass Effect 2 in terms of gamer anticipation. Still, Square Enix is maddeningly tight-lipped about many the game's most important underpinnings, so even after all this time FFXIII remains difficult to get a firm fix on. It'll be a spectacle, no doubt, but will it be spectacular?