The news from Square Enix's DKS3713 event this weekend that a trailer for Final Fantasy Versus XIII will be included on the Blu-ray version of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete is a put-up-or-shut-up moment for the publisher. They've been recompiling and tweaking the same game footage since Versus was announced more than two years ago at E3, slowly adding new bits of CG with each successive showing. Now that everyone will have access to the game's trailer, they'll actually have to show us something new.
Fortunately, there's hope, as the 10 seconds of new footage in the latest cut of the trailer apparently consists of in-game, real-time footage -- which means they actually have a game engine now. The scene in question is extremely brief, and consists simply of the game's sullen main character in a natty black suit (whose real-world counterpart is on display at the event) walking up a grand stairway onto an observation platform looking out over a nighttime cityscape, strongly reminiscent of the Tokyo Skyview in Roppongi. (The trailer does say it's a fantasy based on the real world, after all.) At the top of the stairs is a blond woman who turns to face him and smiles enigmatically.
It's not much, but that sequence definitely has a different look to it than the rest of the trailer -- the main character seems slightly lankier and less detailed than elsewhere, and the woman's hair falls about her face in a way that isn't quite consistent with the hair of female characters in previous scenes. It's a subtle difference, but as many times as I've seen this trailer now, it's definitely noticeable. But after watching some of the documentary sequences on display around the show floor, I realized that this sequence doesn't depict a drop in the quality of Square's CG output -- it represents a real-time cut-scene whose visual quality vastly exceeds any video before. What would be slightly disappointing as a prerendered sequence is utterly astounding as live 3D footage, assuming they haven't faked it.
Not that there's necessarily any reason to fake it -- Square's graphical output, at least with the Final Fantasy series, tends to fall into three tiers: prerendered CG, real-time cut-scenes, and gameplay sequences. Typically the real-time cut-scenes are a step above the game portions, since they omit factors like enemy AI and game mechanics, but well below the quality of the CG. With Versus, the developers appear to have brought the in-engine story sequences nearly up to par with the prerendered visuals. Most likely the actual gameplay won't be too far behind.
Of course, no one actually knows what that gameplay will be like; even after all this time, Square Enix hasn't said a single word about Versus' mechanics, systems or even its specific genre. It's destined to be a long wait -- but at least we'll have something pretty to look at when it's all said and done.
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