Tetsuya Nomura Provides Final Fantasy Versus & Agito XIII Status Updates

Does it seem like you've been waiting ages for Final Fantasy Versus XIII? Well guess what? You have!

But progress is definitely being made on the game. Director Tetsuya Nomura shared a slight update on Versus and its sister project Final Fantasy Agito XIII The 3rd Birthday official Twitter earlier today.

First, some bad news. If you were expecting a Versus XIII update from this month's GamesCom, you can end that hope right now. Nomura confirms that the game will not be shown at the European event. Square Enix will be focusing on The 3rd Birthday and Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded.

So how about September's Tokyo Game Show? Nomura didn't comment on TGS. This does sound like a safe bet to us, though! Of course, Versus would be in good company as it's looking like The Last Guardian is going to be at the show as well.

Nomura provided somewhat of a hint at development progress on Versus and Agito. Said Nomura, "Agito and Versus have different production styles and progress states, but they're both presently undergoing voice casting. The 3rd Birthday's recording will end shortly. Next up is Agito."

Nomura is presumably referring here to the games' Japanese voice casting. In previous Twitter comments about The 3rd Birthday's voice recording, he expressed the opinion that voice direction is difficult unless recording is done first in Japanese.

Regarding Versus, Nomura said that there is a lot to announce about the game, but due to Square Enix's policy of promoting games in the order of their release, he's unable to say too much at present.

He provided just one intriguing bit, though: "There have been many questions regarding fields. It's not a completely open world. It's like the 2D FF games in HD. Although, in terms of looks, it's not a top-down view, it's like the screenshots that have been released. You'll move through the world from that view."

Unless you have access to Dengeki PlayStation or Weekly Famitsu (or have seen scans floating around somewhere), you've probably not seen the screenshots Nomura is referring to, as Square Enix has yet to share them online. We provided impressions of the screenshots (yes, only a Final Fantasy game could possibly get impressions of screenshots), but Nomura's point is that the game will have a third person view from behind the back of main character Noctis.

So why the comparison to the 2D FF games of old? You'll have speculate about that in the comments.





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