FF to look like Advent Children?
That's the aim with XIII.
Final Fantasy XIII director Motomu Toriyama says he wants the fight scenes in Square-Enix's PlayStation 3 RPG to look like the ones in computer-generated film Final Fantasy VII Advent Children.
"FFXIII attempts to see how far it's possible to make FFVII Advent Children's battles into a game," he told Dengeki Online. "FFVII Advent Children is a video production, and it showed us battles that have not been achievable in FF so far. With FFXIII, we're focusing on how far we can realise the video."
Ambitious Mr. Toriyama (not to be confused with Akira Toriyama of Chrono Trigger fame, obviously, although happily confused with the Toriyama who made FFX-2 since that was this one) also said the developer is aiming to have a playable demo ready for next year's E3 - tellingly not mentioning either 2006 Game Convention or the Tokyo Game Show.
Final Fantasy XIII, announced at this year's E3, is actually being developed as a series - the first time a Final Fantasy game has been done this way from the outset - with Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Versus XIII (handled by the Kingdom Hearts team - the "Versus" referring to a change of direction rather than specifying multiplayer) on their way for PS3 and Final Fantasy Agito XIII in development for mobiles. Other games are said to be on the way.
Shown off in video form during Sony's E3 conference, FFXIII boasted typically grand CG battle scenes and environments, and also gave us a glimpse of the battle system - looking vastly more attractive than any of the firm's PlayStation 2 titles, as you'd expect. It wasn't up to Advent Children's standards by any measure, but it was a dramatic improvement - and if Toriyama's comments are anything to go by Square-Enix hasn't finished playing with the graphics just yet.
Indeed, Square-Enix are probably one of the developers best set to capitalise on the next-gen arms race - having employed huge departments to work on cinema-quality graphics for several years, they're ideally placed to simply turn their attentions to doing things in real time. We shall see.
More on FFXIII soon.