Final Fantasy XIII's VA is gonna be awesome (plus: scans)
 

Totally deserves the thread: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0YaQnUOu4k&fmt=18


I didn't think it was possible I'd become even less enticed about the character design in this work. Lo and behold, Nomura does not leave you disappointed.

He looks like Loz.

Even more confirmation that XIII is VII-2?

Really liking XIII-Versus look so very much more, even if it is VIII-2. VIII has a lot of potential in style and the kind of setting it is, so Squeenix trying to do it right this time is cool by me.

But it's the biggest anime video game.

That's gotta count for something!

You know, I'm really not minding the idea of callbacks to earlier titles. FF9 was a shout out to a lot of the SNES-era games of the series and was for the most part great, so long as you could get past the art style. I mean, they had "The Crystals are back!" right on the case, so you knew it was going to incorporate a lot of those elements.

Now I'll admit 7 wasn't perfect, nor was 8 by a long shot, but I'm re-playing 7 from PSN and it's not a bad game in the least. There were some missed opportunities, like making Shinra the main villain for the first few hours and then tossing it out the window and having them pop up almost as an afterthought while you chase Sephy, and a showdown with Rufus would have been great, since they already had you fight him once, and Midgar was reduced to a small sandbox of only three of the eight sectors when they could have done more with it or made you come back to explore more, but overall, while not the absolute best game ever, it's still quite good. The premise is solid, the cast is actually pretty good compared to the tripe we seem to be getting these days, and everything was colorful and varied. There are worse things to pull from.

FF9 was basically every good thing about every earlier Final Fantasy. XIII is different in that it is solely a FFVII Recolor, only I'd hardly call it a recolor since the primary color is still green.

I'd say it's more fair to call it a mix of 7, 8, 9, 10, and/or 12. You have Lightning pulled from 7 along with her relationship with The Man, but you also have the mass amounts of airships from 9 and 12 from the looks of things and the geography of 10 with 8's high technology.

How exactly is it a VII recolor?

Female protagonist is designed to basically be a female Cloud. In the E3 trailer we saw Sephirotina. New character looks like Loz. The heavy emphasis on green is a hint, similar to that of Mako. Sahz is Barret but about a million times cooler. You play as part of some rebel faction. There's more, but I'm lazy.

Well if that isn't shallow, I don't know what is. From video I saw, Sahz is NOTHING like Barret past them sharing a skin tone. He's a family man, yes, but is much softer and more impulsive without being nearly as much of a hothead.

I mean, not to sound the ass, but if you're going to talk about something, you should look a bit past face value, even if it doesn't directly support your argument. I mean, shit, Snow is visually and structurally more like Seifer than Sahz is like Barret.

Not that I'm calling Squeenix racist, but when Sahz is the third main party member of black persuasion in the history of the franchise, at least so far as I recall, it's hard to not draw comparisons.

Snow is more like KH2 Seifer, and KH2, while having a few characters from other FFs, was always primarily Disney meets FF7, not simply Disney meets FF.

Furthermore, XIII just has more of an aesthetic style along the lines of VII, in the same way as XIII Versus is very heavily drawing its style from VIII.

Further Expounding: FFVIII had a ton of influence from FFVII, but VIII's world was just ever so slightly more grounded in ours and while FFVII was a story about eco-terrorists fighting an evil corporation, FFVIII was a love story. Look at the trailers for the games. Do you kinda see where I'm coming from with all this?