If you’ve been awake at any time in the past hour or so, you may well be aware that Microsoft’s just had their big E3 press conference in Los Angeles. You might be aware that there’s been some pretty big announcements: Gears 2‘s got its release date, Avatars and the new-style dashboard have been unveiled and Microsoft have made a bigger shift into the casual gaming market with a brand new Scene It, karaoke game LIPS and You’re In The Movies. Oh, and Final Fantasy XIII was announced as coming to the Xbox 360.
See that last one? That’s huge. That’s the mother of all E3 announcements, and the conference has barely begun. Why so? Hit the jump to find out.
1) It’s never happened before
Final Fantasy and Microsoft have never seemed like a likely pairing, to be honest. Final Fantasy games from VII through to XII have appeared exclusively on the PlayStation family of consoles (except for MMO FFXI) and it looked like incarnation thirteen was headed in the same direction. Save for some spinoffs on other formats (Crisis Core, Crystal Chronicles, Tactics, etc) the ‘main’ series of Final Fantasy has recently enjoyed a long stay on the Sony format, even re-releasing the original Nintendo versions on the PSone towards the end of the console’s lifetime.
Nearly every game in the chronological series of FF has been released on Sony’s family of consoles so it’s genuinely surprising that Square Enix have decided to bring their latest game to the 360. The chances are, people might pick it up out of curiosity, having heard great things about the PlayStation series but never having played it for themselves: that’s more money for Square, who look to be netting as much cash as they can (see point 3 for more on that).
2) It looks the utter bomb
Let’s be frank. The 360, at first glance, does not seem like the right sort of console to host Final Fantasy XIII. When the first screens were unveiled everybody was convinced that there was no way this game would appear on anything bar the PS3. It looked like a game that would need every last one of the processors the Cell could throw at it, never mind the three that the 360′s Xenon chip offers. FFXIII looks staggering and it’s a testament to Square that they’re managing to cram the entire game onto (a million or so) 360 DVDs. Not convinced? Just look at this trailer, fresh from the Microsoft press conference.
I’m pretty sure the word “epic” was invented for this sort of thing. Tell me you didn’t gawp at that, in plain old standard definition. That is jaw-droppingly epic, especially if this is the in-game footage it’s purporting to be. If the 360 can pull all of this off, I will be well and truly impressed. As the folks from Square Enix said at their press conference just an hour or so ago, FFXIII is going to be “faster and flashier” than any Final Fantasy that’s gone before, and you can definitely see it here.
Of course, in the same way that Resident Evil 4 lost some edge by converting realtime cutscenes to MPEGs to save on system resources during its Gamecube-to-PS2 conversion, it’s entirely possible that Square Enix may cut down on the amount of action rendered on-the-fly in the 360 version of the game as, to be fair, the console may not be able to cope. Still, everything looks appropriately fantastic and this is just another killer app to appear in the 360′s future lineup.
Anything else? Oh, yeah, the money. Final Fantasy means big bucks, and my profit-based speculation awaits on page two.
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