Japan: The Squeenix Closed Theatre Report
As mentioned in previous Japan trip reports (I've only got a couple left to go now, I swear!) one of the many trip highlights was personally getting to see the trailers shown in Squeenix's closed theatre at the Tokyo Gameshow. I'm not going to bother going into too much scene-by-scene detail, since my memory is not that photographic and there'll be places all over the web you can find those kinds of summaries by now (not to mention low quality video versions all over youtube). But I (and the rest of our party) did come out of there bursting to talk about it, and we all know how much I love editorialising, so I'm going to focus more on what we thought of it all.
Like many Square Enix fans I’ve had some mixed feelings about a lot of their recent products. They’ve been responsible for producing most of the games that have ever made my all time favourites list (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII and X, Kingdom Hearts II, The World Ends With You), but also a lot I’ve never managed to muster more than ambivalence towards at best (most of the rest of the FF series, including spin-offs) and a good few others that have made me want to take to their lead designers with the Clue-bat of How Not To Destroy Everything I Ever Loved (Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2 and XII, everything they’ve done with FFVII since 1997, and the last five minutes of WEWY). Each to their own and all that, since even most of the rest of titles have their own devoted fans out their somewhere, and their good games still remain really, impressively good - but the bottom line is that it’s very hard to be impressed by the shameless hype-mongering they’ve been keeping up in recent years by releasing all their newest trailers only in the UBER EXCLUSIVE closed theatres at events like the TGS, for which seats are so limited that we missed out on them completely on the first day and had to leave the hotel at 5:30 AM to make it through the queues on the second. The point I’m building up to is that those trailers were going to have to be really damn awesome to make all that bother seem worthwhile, so getting halfway through the show and already finding myself thinking “Wow, this was completely worth everything!” in between a whole lot of completely fangirlish incoherence was a very welcome surprise. Whatever’s actually in store for us once all these games make it to the shelves, they definitely know how to put on a good show.
The first couple of trailers were for a couple of Kingdom Hearts mobile games - one I’d heard of before, Kingdom Hearts: Coded, and another which was a much simpler deal which seemed to be based mainly around the gimmick of letting people create Kingdom Hearts avatars and play through various puzzle games. Not much interest there for anyone who’s never going to own a Japanese mobile, but the avatars were pretty cute. Coded is in a similar boat for me, though it’s got much snazzier graphics. As far as I understand it it’s largely another puzzle game set in a virtual world in the KH universe and is unlikely to have any kind of lasting plot significance, so if I never get to play it I’m not going to have to feel like I’m missing out on much. The preview cut scenes did look pretty cool, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention and couldn’t tell you much about what was going on in those scenes. On to the important trailers!
Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days
This was the first serious game in the trailer queue, and also one I’m glad to be able to deal with first so I can get the bad news out of the way and on to the serious awesome that was to come later on in the screening. If you’ve been following KH news at all you probably know this one’s a DS game revolving around the Roxas and the other Organisation members, set between KH1 and KH2. If you’ve paid enough attention to ongoing news you might know that some of the latest info included a few teaser scenes involving a 14th member of Organisation 13, who looked like a teenaged girl in a black hood. If the word ‘Mary Sue’ means anything to you - or if you’ve just got a modicum of basic good taste - this was probably when alarm bells started going off in your head.
It pains me to have to report that she is, going by those trailer impressions, everything we could have possibly feared she might be. Officially her name is apparently ‘Xion’, but in better keeping with more traditional Nobody naming conventions, let’s call her ‘ Xarmy Suxe’. She’s BFF with Roxas and Axel and gets to cozy up to them in all their ice-cream sharing scenes. Riku thinks she’s so wonderful that he’s happily ignoring the fact that she’s an enemy Nobody to go out of his way to be nice to her. The official explanation for her existence - and here is where we really had to see just how far our jaws could unhinge - is that she’s ‘somewhere between Kairi and Namine’ (hey, did I mention how she’s great friends with Namine too?) What I think this translates to is that she’s somehow Kairi’s other Nobody, only it is all so very much worse for her because she’s the one who’s not supposed to exist, and there is much woe and angst and sadness that she may never find a place in the world!
I’m going to give all of you who’ve played KHII and gone through the whole Nobody non-existence angst-fest a moment or two to digest that one.
Axel: Shove her just a little harder Roxas, she'll go right off the edge!
She’s so sad and pitiful that other characters - Roxas and Axel in particular - are going out of their way and putting aside their own massive angsty problems to help make her feel better about hers. As for Riku, let’s remember here that this is all set well before he fought Roxas or had the slightest idea that Roxas was Sora’s Nobody or that anyone in the Org might be anyone remotely sympathetic. She is the Sue-iest Sue who ever Sued. Future generations will be using her as the definitive textbook example to demonstrate all that is Sueish. Did I mention that she gets her own keyblade too? Or that she’s the 14th member of Organisation 13?
(Whew, sorry ‘bout that. I’m calm, really.)
This is all a bit of a shame, because the actual gameplay parts of the trailer looked really cool. I’m not the Org’s biggest fan, but I was generally pretty impressed by the amount of distinctiveness Square managed to give most of them, and I have an awful fondness for games that let me play as villain characters from a previous instalment and try out all those neat moves they kept using on me the first time through. There were lots of amusing little character touches too, like Marluxia healing himself in this twirly hail of flower petals. But if half as much of the game revolves around Xarmy as it looks from that trailer, this may be the first KH game ever where I start skipping cut scenes.
I would like to be able to say here that this is early impressions of a trailer in a language I’m not so good at and I may have gotten a few things wrong here, but I don't have much hope. The trouble with the basic Mary Sue plotline is that if you’re not familiar with it, there can be a dangerous couple of minutes after someone pitches the idea to you where sounds like it could be an interesting story. There’s a Tenchi Muyo movie and a set of Sabre Marionette OAVs out there already (neither series the best example of good writing out there, but they still didn’t deserve that) revolving entirely around Sue characters, probably for that very reason, and there are bound to be plenty of others too. I can only assume Squeenix has brought a new writer on board and fallen into the same trap.
Of course, she’s presumably going to go with one of the old school Mary Sue traditions and die tragically at the end, but it’s not going to make up for very much.
Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep
Next up was Birth by Sleep, which went a long way to making me feel a whole lot better about the universe. The basics on this one: it’s a prequel to Kingdom Hearts revolving around the three keyblade users we saw in the secret ending of KHII and delving into Xehanort’s backstory. Main characters are a brown-haired dude called Terra, a Roxas-a-like called Ven (who obviously has some Massive Plot Connection to Sora and Roxas which I’m sure they’ll get to explaining to us sooner or later) and a girl called Aqua who’s been pretty miserably neglected in promotion materials up until now.
To properly explain why I enjoyed this particular trailer so much, I’m going to have to take a moment here to give you some personal context: see, anyone who knows me well would know I am All In Favour of games featuring pretty slashy boys, but after the series has already given us Sora and Riku and then Roxas and Axel, and then the early promotion materials for BBS came out largely centred around Terra and Ven being rather gay together, my reaction came down to “yeah, been there, shipped that - look, can’t we have a cool female character or two just for a change?” So far, the only KH female lead has been Kairi, who, while by no means one of the worst token females out there, is woefully underutilised and underdeveloped. I loved Namine to bits and am very fond of a lot of the female FF cast who made it into the game, but it’d be nice to have a lead female kicking some arse around the KH world for once. Alas, all we’d seen of Aqua so far suggested she’d be making Kairi look important.
You can imagine my glee then when Aqua was all through this new trailer, and swiftly revealed to be nine kinds of shear, undiluted awesome.
From those brief trailer impressions, Aqua comes across as sensible, level headed, loyal and every bit as fit for combat as the boys are, if not more so - or to put it another way, there’s not the slightest impression she’s there either just for cheesecake or that she’ll have to sit through any more rescues than the male characters will endure. You won’t be able to make it out in any of the videos people managed to sneak out of the theatre, but I love how she moves in battle too. They seem to have refined her a little since that first Kingdom Hearts secret ending (or maybe she just had helmet hair that day), but I liked her costume and character design right away. There’s more to the whole impression that’s a bit hard to get across without showing people the whole trailer, but in short, she’s looking like pretty much everything I wasn’t even bothering to hope we might get. Major points to Squeenix Five minutes later and I’m almost ready to forgive you for Xarmy already.
Moving on from Aqua, Terra’s growing on me too. He’s going to be a very different hero to Sora - not a bad thing, much as I love Sora - and both he and Aqua look a lot older and more mature than the KH leads. Ven actually looks like the youngest of the trio by a good few years. It’s a bit hard to tell where Roxas stops and he starts so far character-wise, but there’s enough distinctiveness to him so far to give me some hope (though seriously, I am very curious about how on earth they’re going to explain why he looks exactly like a Nobody who won’t even appear for such a long time). The main worlds we’ve seen them go through so far have been Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty’s - not the newest or most exciting of Disney worlds, but it fits very well in with the prequel theme and the whole ‘seven princesses of heart’ plotline from the other games. I will say this is likely to be the last game I can deal with Malificent in before I get a bit tired of her, but again, it’s hard to argue that it makes sense to have her around.
I cannot wait to get to play this game. =3
Dissidia: Final Fantasy
This was another of the big surprises of the screening for me. Up until now I’ve been pretty skeptical about this game. A fighting game featuring all the FF heroes and villains sounded awfully gratuitous - your typical case of Squeenix trying to milk maximum $$ out of the Final Fantasy name with a minimum of new ideas. I have seen some of the newer trailers and found them all very shiny and what, but they didn’t make much of a lasting impression on me overall.
And yet…
In the theatre, with the trailer playing up there on the big screen in high resolution, watching all the heroes line up and go into this giant tag team battle against all of each others villains - and it just keeps on going every time you start thinking you must’ve seen the best of it by now - turned out to be the kind of epically shiny awesome that makes it very hard not to dissolve into a happy little puddle of fannish squee. The game looks like it’s been based on a giant crossover crack fic, but the thing I seem to have forgotten up to recently is that I like crack fic an awful damn lot, and this is definitely looking like the good kind of crack. I still won’t be able to take the plot remotely seriously, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a whole lot of fun. Or to put it another way, it's looking a lot like Smash Brothers, only with Final Fantasy characters instead of a random Nintendo cast.
An extra surprise in the game’s favour is that in addition to all the male leads from the series the character cast is going to include Terra from FFVI (we’d initially thought Locke was in it too, but it looks like we’d just gotten one of the other early series heroes mixed up with him instead). I’m not FFVI’s biggest fan - I can see the appeal of the game, but there were so many characters with so little plot relevance that the result turned into something of a mish-mash that I could never quite get into. Discovering Terra was in Dissidia, however, turned into another one of those big fangirl moments of glee. FFVI is one of few games in the series where there’s room for some debate about who the actual lead character is. In some respects the game seems to be pushing Locke (the male lead, who’s usually the default leader of your party and such), but in all fairness, when it comes down to who’s the more central to the plot, Locke’s got nothing on Terra. It’s hugely satisfying to see Squeenix themselves coming down on the same side of the question and adding at least one much needed female to a cast dominated by male leads - and usually male villains too - from every other game in the series.
In a final stroke of luck, two of our party (pinneagig and jaseroque) managed to score tickets to try out the Dissidia demo from a couple of passers by who had some they weren’t using for some reason, and returned back with the report that the game is also an awful lot of fun to play. There’s no shaking the fact that Squeenix are definitely still pandering to their fanbase with shameless shiny things with Dissidia, but hell, I am a fan, and I’m not at all averse to being pandered to once in a while.
After that there was a trailer for the Parasite Eve game Third Birthday, which looks kind of cool but isn’t something I’m particularly into, and one for the new FFVII:AC with even more added scenes because Squeenix knows what you all really want to do is shell out even more money for the same over-hyped product all over again. But at least we got to catch our breath a bit before the next lot of trailers came on.
Final Fantasy XIII
Like most of us Squeenix fans I do like the look of this game an awful lot, but I can’t say this next trailer wowed me as much as a lot of the other ones. Probably this is because there wasn’t all that much new material on top of what I’d seen in previous trailers so while it’s all very shiny it’s not so very new, and when your very first promotion material features Lightning being so very awesome as all that there’s not much you can do to top it later. The new material as best I could guess seemed to be a few extra fight scenes and a few snippets of dialogue, not a whole lot to go on. Oh, and Mr Shoe Size has a name now - it’s Snow, which… look, I’m sorry, but he’s a very manly dude (especially by FF hero standards), and I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but that’s not a very manly name. We picked up a copy of Playstation Magazine on the way home and spent a fun few minutes trying to romanise the katakana for his last name too, which kept coming out as things like ‘Veryass’ or ‘Willyass’, only to eventually get home and discover that ‘Villiers’ was the official version. Somehow, with our sense of humour, I don’t know whether that’s going to stick…
There’s also the Red Haired Chick, who I’m still finding a bit lacklustre. So far we’ve seen her stand around, stand around looking meek, stand around looking vaguely positive but still pretty meek, and stand around in a hood looking… you get the idea. Her character design isn’t doing much for me either. Call me picky, but when Lightning and Veryarse are running around doing all that cool stuff, I’m going to expect a character to put on a bit more of a show than that if you want me to invest in them.
My main worry about this game, quite separate from anything in the theatre, is reports that it’s going to have a similar battle system to FFXII, whereby the idea seems to be to give your characters a few preset instructions, go make a coffee and come back ten minutes later to see whether they’ve done anything useful with themselves yet. Call me old fashioned, but something about a battle system which only expects the player to make maybe a little executive input every couple of rounds just doesn’t do much to get me involved in the game (and after playing Kingdom Hearts I’m finding even the standard RPG turn based system a little slow). But we’ll have to wait and see how that aspect turns out a bit closer to the release date.
Overall, FFXIII’s definitely still looking cool. It’s just feeling like a bit past time they gave us some more to go on here.
Final Fantasy Agito XIII
Another game I’ve not been paying a lot of attention to since I don’t own a Japanese mobile phone, so the most encouraging news about this one was that it’s getting a PSP release as well. Still, it’s a little hard for me to get as excited about this one as the other FF:XIII titles. There are plenty of playable characters in the roster, but they’re are all of the similar age and wearing the same school uniform, the only things that really differentiate them is height, weaponry and the colour of their hair. I’m not that fond of the uniforms themselves either - or more to the point, unless you’re an angry Scotsman with blue paint on your face, I’m going to have great trouble taking anyone who’s fighting in a small tartan skirt very seriously. Still, the scene at the end where the characters are all doing their Epic Pose in their hoods and cloaks out on the battlefield did look very cool, and the graphics certainly live up to Squeenix standards for shininess. It’s just going to take a bit more plot to get me as excited about this one as most of the rest of the line up.
Final Fantasy Versus XIII
Finally, we get to Versus XIII: title of snazzy preview trailers filled with incredibly mixed messages. One minute we’re seeing the lead character being all angsty and dark in a castle somewhere and beating the crap out of a whole army of soldiers single-handedly, the next he’s on some kind of sunny road trip with three of his mates. Wherever it is exactly they’re going with it all though, this would be another hit for the Dissidia principle - it may be on crack, but it looks kinda awesome. Again, largely stuff we’ve seen or at least heard about before, but still very cool to get to see it all on the big screen for ourselves, and there’s this one scene in there of Prince Dude and his friends all doing the overdramatic slow motion walk towards the camera - we all just about died laughing. Those four are a boyband waiting to happen, I swear!
So I guess the main feature of the new trailer is all the scenes between Noctis and Stella - being the main character and the one female character we’ve seen in some of the other recent promotion stuff. (Obviously that’s ‘Noctis’ and ‘Stella’ as in ‘night’ and ‘star’. Not terrible names to my mind, but between that, Lightning and Snow, Squeenix are clearly keeping themselves a very solid theme these days.) I’m having great trouble deciding what to make of Stella. For most of the trailer, she’s standing around in this little white dress talking to Noctis at length about something mysterious and plot related, and doing that horribly cutsy little backwards walk thing with her hands clasped behind her back that gave us all bad flashbacks to some of the more nauseating things characters like Rinoa and Crisis Core’s bastardisation of Aeris have put us through in the past. Then at the end, for just one scene, she’s got a rapier out and there are all fancy light effects behind her to show she has much the same powers as Noctis, and suddenly it’s all looking very serious and cool… and then the scene ends again. So while most of her appearance makes her look like one of those horribly ditzy females that a lot of us complain about to no end, a few more of those shiney scenes and she might be looking like someone genuinely interesting. Definitely a character to keep a close eye on, and maybe heckle occasionally if she’s not keeping up the standard.
(I swear, I’m not usually this fixated on the female cast in these games. I must be really getting over the generic Squeenix pretty boy lately.)
And that was it for the trailer session (please make sure you’ve picked up all your belongings and head for the exit to your right, and oh, btw, the large guy in the Squeenix shirt wants a word with you about that camera he saw you sneakily trying to use in there…) To summarise, really looking forward to Birth by Sleep and Dissidia, definitely interested in all the FFXIII games, not especially fussed about the mobile phone games or Parasite Eve, and majorly disappointed with 358/2 Days and the idea they want us to buy yet another version of AC.
To round off the day later on, most of our group headed on to the official Squeenix Store in Shinjuku (excluding me and velithya who were camped out by the ArcSys booth asking their staff difficult questions MORE ON THIS LATER), and came back laden with bags in which the full ‘Square Enix Projects’ name had helpfully had the letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ partially blacked out to demonstrate the correct spelling.
The same thing again courtesy of the official website
And verily, we did laugh all our arses off about that too.
Like many Square Enix fans I’ve had some mixed feelings about a lot of their recent products. They’ve been responsible for producing most of the games that have ever made my all time favourites list (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII and X, Kingdom Hearts II, The World Ends With You), but also a lot I’ve never managed to muster more than ambivalence towards at best (most of the rest of the FF series, including spin-offs) and a good few others that have made me want to take to their lead designers with the Clue-bat of How Not To Destroy Everything I Ever Loved (Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2 and XII, everything they’ve done with FFVII since 1997, and the last five minutes of WEWY). Each to their own and all that, since even most of the rest of titles have their own devoted fans out their somewhere, and their good games still remain really, impressively good - but the bottom line is that it’s very hard to be impressed by the shameless hype-mongering they’ve been keeping up in recent years by releasing all their newest trailers only in the UBER EXCLUSIVE closed theatres at events like the TGS, for which seats are so limited that we missed out on them completely on the first day and had to leave the hotel at 5:30 AM to make it through the queues on the second. The point I’m building up to is that those trailers were going to have to be really damn awesome to make all that bother seem worthwhile, so getting halfway through the show and already finding myself thinking “Wow, this was completely worth everything!” in between a whole lot of completely fangirlish incoherence was a very welcome surprise. Whatever’s actually in store for us once all these games make it to the shelves, they definitely know how to put on a good show.
The first couple of trailers were for a couple of Kingdom Hearts mobile games - one I’d heard of before, Kingdom Hearts: Coded, and another which was a much simpler deal which seemed to be based mainly around the gimmick of letting people create Kingdom Hearts avatars and play through various puzzle games. Not much interest there for anyone who’s never going to own a Japanese mobile, but the avatars were pretty cute. Coded is in a similar boat for me, though it’s got much snazzier graphics. As far as I understand it it’s largely another puzzle game set in a virtual world in the KH universe and is unlikely to have any kind of lasting plot significance, so if I never get to play it I’m not going to have to feel like I’m missing out on much. The preview cut scenes did look pretty cool, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention and couldn’t tell you much about what was going on in those scenes. On to the important trailers!
Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days
This was the first serious game in the trailer queue, and also one I’m glad to be able to deal with first so I can get the bad news out of the way and on to the serious awesome that was to come later on in the screening. If you’ve been following KH news at all you probably know this one’s a DS game revolving around the Roxas and the other Organisation members, set between KH1 and KH2. If you’ve paid enough attention to ongoing news you might know that some of the latest info included a few teaser scenes involving a 14th member of Organisation 13, who looked like a teenaged girl in a black hood. If the word ‘Mary Sue’ means anything to you - or if you’ve just got a modicum of basic good taste - this was probably when alarm bells started going off in your head.
It pains me to have to report that she is, going by those trailer impressions, everything we could have possibly feared she might be. Officially her name is apparently ‘Xion’, but in better keeping with more traditional Nobody naming conventions, let’s call her ‘ Xarmy Suxe’. She’s BFF with Roxas and Axel and gets to cozy up to them in all their ice-cream sharing scenes. Riku thinks she’s so wonderful that he’s happily ignoring the fact that she’s an enemy Nobody to go out of his way to be nice to her. The official explanation for her existence - and here is where we really had to see just how far our jaws could unhinge - is that she’s ‘somewhere between Kairi and Namine’ (hey, did I mention how she’s great friends with Namine too?) What I think this translates to is that she’s somehow Kairi’s other Nobody, only it is all so very much worse for her because she’s the one who’s not supposed to exist, and there is much woe and angst and sadness that she may never find a place in the world!
I’m going to give all of you who’ve played KHII and gone through the whole Nobody non-existence angst-fest a moment or two to digest that one.
Axel: Shove her just a little harder Roxas, she'll go right off the edge!
She’s so sad and pitiful that other characters - Roxas and Axel in particular - are going out of their way and putting aside their own massive angsty problems to help make her feel better about hers. As for Riku, let’s remember here that this is all set well before he fought Roxas or had the slightest idea that Roxas was Sora’s Nobody or that anyone in the Org might be anyone remotely sympathetic. She is the Sue-iest Sue who ever Sued. Future generations will be using her as the definitive textbook example to demonstrate all that is Sueish. Did I mention that she gets her own keyblade too? Or that she’s the 14th member of Organisation 13?
(Whew, sorry ‘bout that. I’m calm, really.)
This is all a bit of a shame, because the actual gameplay parts of the trailer looked really cool. I’m not the Org’s biggest fan, but I was generally pretty impressed by the amount of distinctiveness Square managed to give most of them, and I have an awful fondness for games that let me play as villain characters from a previous instalment and try out all those neat moves they kept using on me the first time through. There were lots of amusing little character touches too, like Marluxia healing himself in this twirly hail of flower petals. But if half as much of the game revolves around Xarmy as it looks from that trailer, this may be the first KH game ever where I start skipping cut scenes.
I would like to be able to say here that this is early impressions of a trailer in a language I’m not so good at and I may have gotten a few things wrong here, but I don't have much hope. The trouble with the basic Mary Sue plotline is that if you’re not familiar with it, there can be a dangerous couple of minutes after someone pitches the idea to you where sounds like it could be an interesting story. There’s a Tenchi Muyo movie and a set of Sabre Marionette OAVs out there already (neither series the best example of good writing out there, but they still didn’t deserve that) revolving entirely around Sue characters, probably for that very reason, and there are bound to be plenty of others too. I can only assume Squeenix has brought a new writer on board and fallen into the same trap.
Of course, she’s presumably going to go with one of the old school Mary Sue traditions and die tragically at the end, but it’s not going to make up for very much.
Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep
Next up was Birth by Sleep, which went a long way to making me feel a whole lot better about the universe. The basics on this one: it’s a prequel to Kingdom Hearts revolving around the three keyblade users we saw in the secret ending of KHII and delving into Xehanort’s backstory. Main characters are a brown-haired dude called Terra, a Roxas-a-like called Ven (who obviously has some Massive Plot Connection to Sora and Roxas which I’m sure they’ll get to explaining to us sooner or later) and a girl called Aqua who’s been pretty miserably neglected in promotion materials up until now.
To properly explain why I enjoyed this particular trailer so much, I’m going to have to take a moment here to give you some personal context: see, anyone who knows me well would know I am All In Favour of games featuring pretty slashy boys, but after the series has already given us Sora and Riku and then Roxas and Axel, and then the early promotion materials for BBS came out largely centred around Terra and Ven being rather gay together, my reaction came down to “yeah, been there, shipped that - look, can’t we have a cool female character or two just for a change?” So far, the only KH female lead has been Kairi, who, while by no means one of the worst token females out there, is woefully underutilised and underdeveloped. I loved Namine to bits and am very fond of a lot of the female FF cast who made it into the game, but it’d be nice to have a lead female kicking some arse around the KH world for once. Alas, all we’d seen of Aqua so far suggested she’d be making Kairi look important.
You can imagine my glee then when Aqua was all through this new trailer, and swiftly revealed to be nine kinds of shear, undiluted awesome.
From those brief trailer impressions, Aqua comes across as sensible, level headed, loyal and every bit as fit for combat as the boys are, if not more so - or to put it another way, there’s not the slightest impression she’s there either just for cheesecake or that she’ll have to sit through any more rescues than the male characters will endure. You won’t be able to make it out in any of the videos people managed to sneak out of the theatre, but I love how she moves in battle too. They seem to have refined her a little since that first Kingdom Hearts secret ending (or maybe she just had helmet hair that day), but I liked her costume and character design right away. There’s more to the whole impression that’s a bit hard to get across without showing people the whole trailer, but in short, she’s looking like pretty much everything I wasn’t even bothering to hope we might get. Major points to Squeenix Five minutes later and I’m almost ready to forgive you for Xarmy already.
Moving on from Aqua, Terra’s growing on me too. He’s going to be a very different hero to Sora - not a bad thing, much as I love Sora - and both he and Aqua look a lot older and more mature than the KH leads. Ven actually looks like the youngest of the trio by a good few years. It’s a bit hard to tell where Roxas stops and he starts so far character-wise, but there’s enough distinctiveness to him so far to give me some hope (though seriously, I am very curious about how on earth they’re going to explain why he looks exactly like a Nobody who won’t even appear for such a long time). The main worlds we’ve seen them go through so far have been Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty’s - not the newest or most exciting of Disney worlds, but it fits very well in with the prequel theme and the whole ‘seven princesses of heart’ plotline from the other games. I will say this is likely to be the last game I can deal with Malificent in before I get a bit tired of her, but again, it’s hard to argue that it makes sense to have her around.
I cannot wait to get to play this game. =3
Dissidia: Final Fantasy
This was another of the big surprises of the screening for me. Up until now I’ve been pretty skeptical about this game. A fighting game featuring all the FF heroes and villains sounded awfully gratuitous - your typical case of Squeenix trying to milk maximum $$ out of the Final Fantasy name with a minimum of new ideas. I have seen some of the newer trailers and found them all very shiny and what, but they didn’t make much of a lasting impression on me overall.
And yet…
In the theatre, with the trailer playing up there on the big screen in high resolution, watching all the heroes line up and go into this giant tag team battle against all of each others villains - and it just keeps on going every time you start thinking you must’ve seen the best of it by now - turned out to be the kind of epically shiny awesome that makes it very hard not to dissolve into a happy little puddle of fannish squee. The game looks like it’s been based on a giant crossover crack fic, but the thing I seem to have forgotten up to recently is that I like crack fic an awful damn lot, and this is definitely looking like the good kind of crack. I still won’t be able to take the plot remotely seriously, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be a whole lot of fun. Or to put it another way, it's looking a lot like Smash Brothers, only with Final Fantasy characters instead of a random Nintendo cast.
An extra surprise in the game’s favour is that in addition to all the male leads from the series the character cast is going to include Terra from FFVI (we’d initially thought Locke was in it too, but it looks like we’d just gotten one of the other early series heroes mixed up with him instead). I’m not FFVI’s biggest fan - I can see the appeal of the game, but there were so many characters with so little plot relevance that the result turned into something of a mish-mash that I could never quite get into. Discovering Terra was in Dissidia, however, turned into another one of those big fangirl moments of glee. FFVI is one of few games in the series where there’s room for some debate about who the actual lead character is. In some respects the game seems to be pushing Locke (the male lead, who’s usually the default leader of your party and such), but in all fairness, when it comes down to who’s the more central to the plot, Locke’s got nothing on Terra. It’s hugely satisfying to see Squeenix themselves coming down on the same side of the question and adding at least one much needed female to a cast dominated by male leads - and usually male villains too - from every other game in the series.
In a final stroke of luck, two of our party (pinneagig and jaseroque) managed to score tickets to try out the Dissidia demo from a couple of passers by who had some they weren’t using for some reason, and returned back with the report that the game is also an awful lot of fun to play. There’s no shaking the fact that Squeenix are definitely still pandering to their fanbase with shameless shiny things with Dissidia, but hell, I am a fan, and I’m not at all averse to being pandered to once in a while.
After that there was a trailer for the Parasite Eve game Third Birthday, which looks kind of cool but isn’t something I’m particularly into, and one for the new FFVII:AC with even more added scenes because Squeenix knows what you all really want to do is shell out even more money for the same over-hyped product all over again. But at least we got to catch our breath a bit before the next lot of trailers came on.
Final Fantasy XIII
Like most of us Squeenix fans I do like the look of this game an awful lot, but I can’t say this next trailer wowed me as much as a lot of the other ones. Probably this is because there wasn’t all that much new material on top of what I’d seen in previous trailers so while it’s all very shiny it’s not so very new, and when your very first promotion material features Lightning being so very awesome as all that there’s not much you can do to top it later. The new material as best I could guess seemed to be a few extra fight scenes and a few snippets of dialogue, not a whole lot to go on. Oh, and Mr Shoe Size has a name now - it’s Snow, which… look, I’m sorry, but he’s a very manly dude (especially by FF hero standards), and I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but that’s not a very manly name. We picked up a copy of Playstation Magazine on the way home and spent a fun few minutes trying to romanise the katakana for his last name too, which kept coming out as things like ‘Veryass’ or ‘Willyass’, only to eventually get home and discover that ‘Villiers’ was the official version. Somehow, with our sense of humour, I don’t know whether that’s going to stick…
There’s also the Red Haired Chick, who I’m still finding a bit lacklustre. So far we’ve seen her stand around, stand around looking meek, stand around looking vaguely positive but still pretty meek, and stand around in a hood looking… you get the idea. Her character design isn’t doing much for me either. Call me picky, but when Lightning and Veryarse are running around doing all that cool stuff, I’m going to expect a character to put on a bit more of a show than that if you want me to invest in them.
My main worry about this game, quite separate from anything in the theatre, is reports that it’s going to have a similar battle system to FFXII, whereby the idea seems to be to give your characters a few preset instructions, go make a coffee and come back ten minutes later to see whether they’ve done anything useful with themselves yet. Call me old fashioned, but something about a battle system which only expects the player to make maybe a little executive input every couple of rounds just doesn’t do much to get me involved in the game (and after playing Kingdom Hearts I’m finding even the standard RPG turn based system a little slow). But we’ll have to wait and see how that aspect turns out a bit closer to the release date.
Overall, FFXIII’s definitely still looking cool. It’s just feeling like a bit past time they gave us some more to go on here.
Final Fantasy Agito XIII
Another game I’ve not been paying a lot of attention to since I don’t own a Japanese mobile phone, so the most encouraging news about this one was that it’s getting a PSP release as well. Still, it’s a little hard for me to get as excited about this one as the other FF:XIII titles. There are plenty of playable characters in the roster, but they’re are all of the similar age and wearing the same school uniform, the only things that really differentiate them is height, weaponry and the colour of their hair. I’m not that fond of the uniforms themselves either - or more to the point, unless you’re an angry Scotsman with blue paint on your face, I’m going to have great trouble taking anyone who’s fighting in a small tartan skirt very seriously. Still, the scene at the end where the characters are all doing their Epic Pose in their hoods and cloaks out on the battlefield did look very cool, and the graphics certainly live up to Squeenix standards for shininess. It’s just going to take a bit more plot to get me as excited about this one as most of the rest of the line up.
Final Fantasy Versus XIII
Finally, we get to Versus XIII: title of snazzy preview trailers filled with incredibly mixed messages. One minute we’re seeing the lead character being all angsty and dark in a castle somewhere and beating the crap out of a whole army of soldiers single-handedly, the next he’s on some kind of sunny road trip with three of his mates. Wherever it is exactly they’re going with it all though, this would be another hit for the Dissidia principle - it may be on crack, but it looks kinda awesome. Again, largely stuff we’ve seen or at least heard about before, but still very cool to get to see it all on the big screen for ourselves, and there’s this one scene in there of Prince Dude and his friends all doing the overdramatic slow motion walk towards the camera - we all just about died laughing. Those four are a boyband waiting to happen, I swear!
So I guess the main feature of the new trailer is all the scenes between Noctis and Stella - being the main character and the one female character we’ve seen in some of the other recent promotion stuff. (Obviously that’s ‘Noctis’ and ‘Stella’ as in ‘night’ and ‘star’. Not terrible names to my mind, but between that, Lightning and Snow, Squeenix are clearly keeping themselves a very solid theme these days.) I’m having great trouble deciding what to make of Stella. For most of the trailer, she’s standing around in this little white dress talking to Noctis at length about something mysterious and plot related, and doing that horribly cutsy little backwards walk thing with her hands clasped behind her back that gave us all bad flashbacks to some of the more nauseating things characters like Rinoa and Crisis Core’s bastardisation of Aeris have put us through in the past. Then at the end, for just one scene, she’s got a rapier out and there are all fancy light effects behind her to show she has much the same powers as Noctis, and suddenly it’s all looking very serious and cool… and then the scene ends again. So while most of her appearance makes her look like one of those horribly ditzy females that a lot of us complain about to no end, a few more of those shiney scenes and she might be looking like someone genuinely interesting. Definitely a character to keep a close eye on, and maybe heckle occasionally if she’s not keeping up the standard.
(I swear, I’m not usually this fixated on the female cast in these games. I must be really getting over the generic Squeenix pretty boy lately.)
And that was it for the trailer session (please make sure you’ve picked up all your belongings and head for the exit to your right, and oh, btw, the large guy in the Squeenix shirt wants a word with you about that camera he saw you sneakily trying to use in there…) To summarise, really looking forward to Birth by Sleep and Dissidia, definitely interested in all the FFXIII games, not especially fussed about the mobile phone games or Parasite Eve, and majorly disappointed with 358/2 Days and the idea they want us to buy yet another version of AC.
To round off the day later on, most of our group headed on to the official Squeenix Store in Shinjuku (excluding me and velithya who were camped out by the ArcSys booth asking their staff difficult questions MORE ON THIS LATER), and came back laden with bags in which the full ‘Square Enix Projects’ name had helpfully had the letters ‘A’ and ‘R’ partially blacked out to demonstrate the correct spelling.
The same thing again courtesy of the official website
And verily, we did laugh all our arses off about that too.