What's the game about? It's a fantasy based on reality, according to the trailer that Square Enix has been tweaking for two and a half years. Everything else is pretty much a mystery.
What's new for TGS? Square showed off a few seconds of real-time in-game footage a couple of months ago; now they've expanded that sequence to about 30 seconds, intercut with the same CG imagery we've been looking at for years.
What our take? Like its sibling Final Fantasy XIII, Versus was announced at E3 2006 and thus far consists entirely of a single trailer that's been remixed and recompiled to death. Its last public appearance two month ago tossed a bit of real-time in-engine graphics to the mix -- the gloomy hero walking through an art gallery on an upper floor of a skyscraper in a slightly futuristic city (basically Tokyo with airships) and talking to a woman. That sequence has been considerably expanded for TGS; now the conversation lasts considerably longer, and its silent dialogue is subtitled. From this, we can glean that the main character of Versus is named Noctis (as in "night") and his female counterpart is named Stella (as in "star"). The bulk of what they talk about is lost in a rapid flurry of Japanese, but it involves the "light inside all of us" -- presumably a reference to the mysterious glowing energy glimpsed in a CG portion of the trailer which materializes from Noctis and an unnamed female in a skirt, causing them to stop short as they rush to greet one another and take up arms instead. This in turn seems to have some relationship to the magical weapons that Noctis and others can draw from thin air; not only the hero and his unwitting opponent, but also a man in white robes who attacks the hero in one CG sequence.
Click the image above to check out all Final Fantasy Versus XIII screens.
The expanded Versus real-time footage isn't especially exciting, since it's just two people talking in an art gallery, but it's definitely impressive from a technical perspective. Square Enix demonstrates its usual mastery of CG art in the Versus trailer, and the in-engine visuals are barely a step beneath the pre-rendered content. An unpracticed eye might not even notice the difference; the characters move a bit more stiffly, and edges are sharper and simpler, but this is one incredible-looking game. Cloth moves naturally, hair falls stylishly but fairly convincingly, and light is beautifully-rendered even in the muted environs of the sky gallery. (A brief reverse shot which shows Noctis in front of a vibrant aquarium is particularly beautiful.) And it's laden with detail, including several Yoshitaka Amano illustrations hanging as artworks within the gallery.
As ever, we can't even begin to hazard a guess as to what genre Versus belongs to, how it will play, or whether or not it will be any good at all. But as an example of what the PlayStation 3 is capable of given time and budget, it should be spectacular. Whenever it arrives, that it; the fact that Square Enix didn't tease a date suggests it's a ways away....
http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3170496
Guess they didnt show much and the game semms so very far away.
