Lightning strikes Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII first debuted in May 2006 at E3 and just last week Yoichi Wada, president of Square Enix, announced the game would not be hitting outside Japan until April 2010 or later. Prospectively, right now we're about two thirds through the four year waiting period for Final Fantasy XIII, still so much is yet to be known about the game and what is known doesn't all piece together well.

The setting for Final Fantasy XIII is the world of Pulse and the floating city of Cocoon. While Pulse is home to much of humanity, it is largely wilderness with a range of critters and lofty beasts. Adversely, Cocoon is nothing short of a metropolis and sanctuary for humanity, said to be created by a free thinking Crystal originating from Pulse. Cocoon is home to highly advanced machinery and weaponry, with quite the arsenal, from an air force to armies of soldiers, much of which are shown off in the title's trailers chasing down Lighting as she invades Cocoon.


The story behind the game has been ever so slowly unveiled by Square Enix that if Final Fantasy XIII were a car show, we'd just have found out that it indeed sports Good Year tires. Cocoon, like any seemingly over powered state in a Final Fantasy game, has a pushy government. That government quarantines anyone suspected to have any connection with Pulse, and removes them from Cocoon.

The longest recognizable symbol of the title has been its lead character, Lightning, who has been front-row-centre in almost all press surrounding Final Fantasy XIII since the original trailer. Lightning was once a part of Cocoon's military, but since then has found herself in the not-so-comfortable position of being summoned by yet more free-thinking Crystals to bring about the “End of the World.” As such, Final Fantasy XIII beginnings with Lightning leading the charge on behalf of the people of Pulse to invade Cocoon, for whatever reason.

L'Cie and fal'Cie: two more Final Fantasy XIII nouns to familiarize yourself with. Two other characters of the game that have been revealed, Snow Villiers and Oerba Dai Vanille, have been labeled as being L'Cie. Those with such a label apparently receive visions from beings--on some sort of spiritual or godly plain--called fal'Cie, of who procure missions for L'Cie to carry out. What their relation is to the free thinking Crystals is unknown, but Snow and Oerba are in fact allies of Lightning in her efforts to invade Cocoon.

The characters of Final Fantasy XIII are shaping up to be just as much a rag-tag group as any other Final Fantasy title. The name of lead character Lightning is yet to be known, as her moniker is but a code name to hide her true identity. Snow Villiers is said to be strong with a somewhat goofy fighting style and is the rider of the Shiva motorcycle. Oerba Dai Vanille hales from Pulse and besides being a L'Cie, remains the most mysterious playable character yet. Other recently revealed ally of Lightning's is Sazh Katzroy, a very sympathetic and emotional man who easily breaks down in tears. Sazh had served in Cocoon's military alongside Lightning and joins her fight early in the game--complete with his Chicobo, a baby chocobo.

Gameplay, an area that has long been an after thought of Square Enix's when showing off Final Fantasy XIII to the public, is finally getting some of the spot light in Japanese magazines. Final Fantasy has long been a cycle of battle screens and running through towns and dungeons, sprinkled with cutscenes. XIII's gameplay lives in the neighbourhood of Final Fantasy XII's, wherein enemies can be seen out in the open and can be freely avoided--provided they don't give chase--with no random battles. However, the battle system for XIII is command driven, unlike XII's free flowing gambit system.

XIII features no form of Magic Points (MP), but only an Action-Time Battle (ATB) cost gauge. The party size is confirmed to have a minimum of three characters under players complete control, who can be issued multiple commands per turn. In fact, supposedly at the beginning of the game, players can chain three attacks together in a single turn per character, which completely drains a character's ATB cost gauge. The ATB cost gauge refills with time and if fewer or less intensive commands are selected in a turn, the gauge refills quicker as it does not get completely depleted.

The last third of the wait for Final Fantasy XIII is shaping up to be more of the same at this rate. However, the producer of the game, Yoshinori Kitase, has said that before XIII's release the whole world will know of Final Fantasy XIII. When exactly they plan to start that is anyone's guess. A demo will be hitting in March, exclusive to Japan of course, which will hopefully shed much more light on XIII than Square Enix has been willing to do for so long. For now a continually slow leak of new characters and screen shots is a pretty safe bet.