TOKYO — Square Enix always keeps their best and latest game trailers behind closed doors, and Tokyo Game Show 2009 is no exception.
After playing the demo of Final Fantasy XIII, show attendees are herded into a small pen next to the demo stations, and get to watch eight trailers for some of the publisher’s most anticipated upcoming games. This is where gameplay footage, new cinematic scenes, and other video that won’t make it onto the ‘tubes for a long time — if ever — is shown. Photography is strictly prohibited.
And that’s a shame, because I’m sure you’d have wanted to see real-time gameplay footage of Final Fantasy Versus XIII, or The 3rd Birthday. Instead, you get me talking about what I remember from the trailers, cobbled together from hastily-scribbled notes. Please enjoy it.
1. Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep
The upcoming PSP edition of the Square Enix/Disney crossover game will feature Snow White and her seven dwarfs, eating a poisoned apple from the Queen, the glass coffin, all of that stuff. But that’s nothing compared to the fact that Stitch, the adorable little blue sharp-toothed alien, will have his own level as well. Some footage from a board game style mini-game was also shown, in which Roxas and other characters like Cinderella roll dice to move around a board and… and do what? I couldn’t tell you. January 2010 in Japan.
2. Kingdom Hearts Mobile
3. Kingdom Hearts Coded
This was just to remind us that these two games, which are currently available for mobile phones in Japan, do in fact exist.
4. The 3rd Birthday
This long-awaited PSP sequel to the Parasite Eve games looks like a lot of fun — it’s actually an over-the-shoulder third person shooter in the Resident Evil 4 milieu.
5. Dissidia Final Fantasy: Universal Tuning
You know this as Dissidia Final Fantasy. It’s the English-language version of the PSP brawler, available soon in Japan, for Japanese people who like listening to English voices.
6. Final Fantasy Versus XIII
Holy cow, they actually showed real gameplay of Final Fantasy Versus XIII! It doesn’t look anywhere close to done, of course. It’s a third-person action game with a free camera — all they showed was a main character running around some unfinished environments with a bare-bones HUD. It’s not enough to determine even what the game’s genre is, to look at this footage — it was literally a video shot off someone’s computer monitor at a development station. In the second scene, the character ran around a field full of crazy dinosaur-lookin’ monsters. Could this be a Monster Hunter-style game? It certainly looks like it from the footage, but who knows?
7. Final Fantasy Agito XIII (pictured top)
This looks much more complete than Versus. The gameplay footage showed a much more polished-looking HUD on the PSP screen — it looked much nicer and more like a finished product than what I remember from the Closed Mega Theaters of years past.
8. Final Fantasy XIII
This was the big one. We first got a lengthy cut scene with the character Snow on a date with his love interest, flying around on some kind of flying machine in a city where a massive fireworks display was going on. Very pretty scene. Then we saw some demos of the game systems Square Enix is showing off at the FFXIII demo — the Optima system and the Driving Mode, both of which I’ll explain later when I write my impressions of the demo. This concluded with many, many more minutes of cut scenes, showing lots of the game’s dramatic confrontations between the main characters and the antagonists.
And that was that! Not as big as in past years, which is probably why it was an adjunct to the Final Fantasy XIII demo experience rather than a separate attraction in Square Enix’s (already massive) booth.
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/09/square-enix-theater/
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VERY cool, I thought S-E had given up on these Private Theatres, it seems not.
Versus 13 looked a bit like MH.....eww I hope not.
Looking forward to Agito 13 & 3rd B'day......some KH info there too
