crazy

Damn, looks cool...

What are the hell are square up to?

The only thing their last games have had in common is effeminate men and gay hair.

Baku: since when did FF games have stuff in common except being pretty much crap? I mean, the basic recipe for a Square game is teenage boy meets teenage girl and then they save the world from some evil guy and the whole plotline is just so stuffed with pseudo-religion/philosophy references and shoddy writing that in the end no one understands what the hell is going on and all the 14-year old kids think it's the deepest story ever.

But they do make great graphics, even though these shots are all CG of girly-men with fab-5 hair does.

haha megido thats a good way to put it.

while i never swore that FF's had the best story ever, it did gave me lots of enjoyment in time, and stuff, it kept it interessting, I for one think FFVIII was the best of them all VII was darn good but is pretty overrated now.
I dont know i play these games because the times i played them all, they sucked me in, it just has some magic to it...the memories i have are happy ones.

Anway I like where this one is going man, Tetsuya Nomura is the best I love his designs

I wish Nomura Died a decade ago. Really Died. I wish...

Shuyinsan: FFVII was the best game ever the first time i played it but to be honest i've basically outgrown the whole genre. I can understand that these games are terrific for young boys, as that's basically who they are designed for, but once you wrap your head around some real literature you'll start seeing that these stories are pretty bad over all. I can still enjoy Final Fantasy 7 out of pure nostalgia but i wouldn't say it's a particularly good game any more.

But as usual i'll probably be stuck with these games at any rate, just to see the hot gfx and get my temporary j-fix when i run out of decent anime :P

Oh and BlimBlim, none of those pictures are in real time, it's all pre rendered, unless square are miracle workers. The quality of lighting, polycount, texturing and so forth is just way out there. I don't care how powerful the cell is supposed to be, you won't see graphics like this on the PS3.

Hey now let's not be like that :)
I am 30 years old and i study litterature for a living but that doesn't stop me from enjoying the ff series, sure the plots are hammy and over the top but they are mostly fantasy stories and compared to the fantasy book genre (the genre is 99% rubbish) they stand up pretty well.
It's not like you play a ff game to be intellectually stimulated.

None are realtime if you ask me, they all have that Square-Enix CGI/FFAC look. Though the game itself shouldn't differ too much if you look at the characters, they'll probably pump the most polygons into those.

WANT!

Megido: sorry but not only for the young boys, I just enjoy these awesome graphics, the wonderful gameplay and good stories (if not, then still). :) I'll be loyal to SE forever. If you see how amazingly good the games always tend to sell in Japan..

Of course the cell or whatever current piece of technology can't render this hot stuff real-time, but they can render something really close to this. I was already amazed by how good the characters looked in X and X-2 (not to speak about the story of those, some people hated that - of course I didn't, loved 'em both) I've spent like 150 hours of my life on those two, not to mention all those other FF's.

But whatever man :), I'm so going to get this piece of wonderful Japanese artwork.

I can't believe someone actually compared literature to video games storyline wise. Really can't think of a more idiotic comparison.

http://www.psu.com/FFXIII-demo-coming-in-2008--a00...

Demo confirmed 2008.

Let that be a Japanese demo of course, but that will not keep me from getting it.

:)

2008 has 12 months. its squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenix.

My guess is the demo is coming out between Febuary to December :P
but like I said, its just a guess :)

I want, I Want! =)
I believe some cut scens are ingame, because ingame gameplay already looks awesome! =)

Baku: most people that love jrpg constantly claim that the stories are the most exquisite pices of work, with complex intrigue and deep spiritual messages. And if you study literature for a living then you should probably know that to be void. Any philosophical insight is usually just stolen from Nietzsche or something and then japanized.

prodygee: In my opinion the Final Fantasy series doesn't sell tremendous numbers in Japan because of it's superb quality, it sell loads because it's Square that makes it and because it's Final fantasy, much like how Bungie can take a dump in a shoebox and call it Halo 3 Mega deluxe edition and people wills till buy that crap. Also the Japanese are EXTREMELY conservative, they like it when the same game comes out five times in a row with a new hairdo on the main character. Well, i guess we like that here too, since we have about one billion games featuring americas favourite hero, Anonymous-shooter-guy! Still the stories, as Baku put it, are often quite hammy and if a JRPG has a crappy story then what's there left to enjoy? Gameplay you say? Choosing attack alternated with heal from a little blue box isn't much gameplay to speak of if you ask me. I'd just rather watch an anime and be rid of the random encounters.

FormlessLikeWater: Okay, so i'm retarded. Sure. Please explain why it's so stupid. As far as i'm concerned both mediums try to deliver a story. Admittedly the game also has to feature interactivity and you can't really set the pace of a game, that's up to the player, but when it's as linear as a JRPG the player isn't allowed much room to muck it up.

Damn nice, game will be superb, design is superb as expected from Nomura :)

Belive it or not but some people actually like the gameplay in rpgs (me) and there are people who like halo 3 not because of the hype but because they think it's a fun game (me). And instead of being forced to sit and watch hammy and shitty anime plots some people rather play rpgs with hammy and shitty plots with a dash of "gameplay" to eliviate the bordedom (me yet again).
But i understand what you are trying to say, the ff series isn't the holy cow it's made out to be, and people who think the ff series has a deep and rich plot should "read a fucking book" (i love yelling that at my poor students) :)

Well if you listen the 12 year boys over at GAF thats your fault.

What I don't understand though, is if you are so against FF and the concept of it, why are you here even commenting on it, other than to get a raise out of people who appreciate the game.

Anyway.

Looks really cool, looks like they are hinting it will have a map like FF8 or something which will be cool, hopefully it won't have random encounters though.

Jolli: It's probably because i'm an attention whore. Seriously, i can enjoy the occasional j-rpg i just feel like i have to throw some crap on them when they get too much hype. And like i said earlier, if i know myself i'll probably be playing FFXIII in the end anyways.

Because you're comparing one form of medium that has been around for hundreds of years to one that's been here for around 30. Hell serious takes have only been around for that long. We forget the whole lost in translation aspect of Japanese to English that just started getting decent all around a few years ago. Also, the storyline is not the only part of a video game, considering they have to actually animate a particular setting, while a writer can just really describe a few things and leave the rest up to the reader to imagine for his or herself. Also, IT IS A VIDEO GAME interaction is key and generally majority of the time will be spent playing and the storyline aspect will either be regulated to cut scenes. Regardless, film had been around for about 50 years before Citizen Kane even came out. It's ridiculous to compare video games to books.

FormlessLikeWater: Well, it's obvious that you are completely missing my point. I'm not talking about how the story is told, comparing books and games from a narrative perspective would just be bonkers. I'm talking about the story itself. No matter how you twist and turn it a bad story isn't any better just cause it's presented in a fairly young medium.

Then again this presents a problem, or should i say a limitation, since perhaps not all kinds of stories are very good for making games out of, what with players needing goals and what not to keep the game interesting. I couldn't even begin to imagine playing a game based on something Kafka wrote for example. And so you basically you always end up saving the world. Then again you can do something like Fahrenheit/indigo prophecy that made both dialogs and different event interactive while not necessarily letting the player have complete control and thus making for interaction and narration at the same time. Too bad that game suffered from a hack writer too.

Look at me go. What i meant to say was in any case that storytelling and writing has been around for ages, of course we have to adapt the techniques when applying them to games but a young medium does not mean that shitty writing magically turns better. It does however mean that it is harder since the amount of experience accumulated within the industry of games is far smaller than that of literature.

"And so you basically you always end up saving the world."

Main problem with video games there that will keep them from advancing themselves as a medium. Developers don't want to "rob" players of all their hard work by giving them a "bad" ending. They only want you to see the success in the end. On Final Fantasy itself, you could easily adapt the stories in any of the games into the novel and it would be far easier to embellish on many things that are going to be lacking as gamers wouldn't really want to sit there and read 45 minutes of dialouge before they can start playing again. I honestly hope you don't think that the premise in the games aren't well founded. Just the expression is what needs work.

By the way, I apologize for the personal insult, it was extremely childish of me and for the giant block of text which is unattractive to read.

Formless: this is of course a subjective topic, i cant tell you what to think.But my opinion is that the adventures square takes us on are pretty shabby. Xenogears is nothing but a world record attempt at most references to Nietzsche and Religion with some big ass robots thrown in the mix, FF7 is just plain confusing (which some people obviously confuse with deep and enigmatic) and i'm not even going to start talking about how "last minute" half of the story of FF8 feels like to me. But like said, it's subjective, my opinion on the matter is not an absolute truth.

Now i agree that video games as a medium is farm from optimal when it comes to relaying a solid story (at least by traditional means) but i'm still convinced that Skaguchi and friends just aren't that brilliant when it comes to writing.

It would be interesting to know how long these games took to write though.

For the japanese versions, full development of FFVII took 2 years (including the preliminary tech research).

full development of FFVIII too a year and a half.

In fact you can say that prior FFX all the FFs were rushed for the domestic market :P