The direct follow-up to last year's mainline entry will be available next Winter.
Today, Square Enix announced that work has begun on a sequel to last year's Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy XIII-2 will continue the story of the mainline release, while offering similar gameplay.
Currently not much else is known about the game other than the target systems and release window. Both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners will be able to pick up the true sequel next Winter, otherwise known as the fourth quarter of 2011 or the first of 2012.
This news is not at all surprising. After developing such an advanced engine for FF XIII, it was an obvious move to reuse it in a new title.
I enjoyed XIII, but I know a lot of people didn't. I'll be interested to see if this sequel sells anywhere as many copies as the original now that people know what they're getting.
I think I read in a place or two that the release is planned for Japan winter 2011, but maybe not. It shouldn't be too long of a delay for a US release.
I'll be interested to see what they do with it, too. I also wonder how post-FF XIII players will react.
This announcement came as a surprise to me, as I hadn't given it thought, but I'm not surprised that they did this. I'm already a little bummed that the title screen looks like a "dark" lightning versus a "light"ning. No idea what that could mean so my judgments are meaningless, but it already leaves the possibility of it being contrived open. All that said, I'm looking forward to it, anyway.
The other important thing to remember is that another (new, I believe) trailer is out for Versus XIII. I need to track it down, but that game looked very interesting from the little amount of gameplay I'd seen previously. Scanning through comments of various websites, more than one other person seems to agree.
Ah, I also think there's more "story" to explore and felt like there were far more locales XIII could have adventured upon, so maybe XIII-2 could help satisfy this. Then again, X-2 re-used a lot of areas, IIRC, so we'll see.
...You know you can edit your comments by double-clicking, right, Chris?
Regardless, I hated the first 15 hours or so of Final Fantasy XIII. I didn't play beyond that. I probably won't spend much time with XIII-2 because of that. Maybe at some point I'll hunt down the rest of the trailers for the other games.
Oh goody, I get to experience the tubed-world wonder of XIII again!
=D
=(
This kind of title is what happens when you want to create a direct sequel to a game in a series where the sequels aren't any sort of continuation of the previous games.
Comments