Coming from someone who barely played FFXIII and isn't big into Square Enix or FF at all but is still fairly curious given how often this game comes up; why were people so excited for Versus after how FFXIII turned out? Was it just completely unrelated to that series beyond being in the same world, or was it due to something else such as the team making it? Is it a spiritual sequel to a different Square franchise?
Because otherwise it always just struck me as a game barely anything was revealed about before falling off the radar for several years and gaining a cult following due to SE's current offerings.
I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the story. It is still rooted in the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythos and lore, which in my opinion is very well conceived. FFXIII itself didn't execute on that mythos to its full potential due to a relatively weak plot and a spotty script, but the themes and concepts themselves that were presented in the game were great. I trust Nojima and Nomura with scenario writing more-so than Toriyama and Watanabe, so I'm excited to see their take on those concepts.
Secondly I'm excited for the gameplay itself, as it sounds like we're finally going to get something more akin to the world map that has been absent since the PS1 days. In an interview, Kitase stated that world maps have fallen out of favor as hardware advanced, because it was difficult to keep a realistic perspective of the characters and the world when the environments are so detailed. However, he added this towards the end of his response (The interview is with a banned site, so I can't link the source, sorry):
Before, if you wanted to achieve all that it’s obviously going to be very expensive of course. But for Final Fantasy Versus XIII we are trying to implement a worldwide view while maintaining that realistic view. It’s a big challenge, but we’re trying our best to make that work.
So I'm pretty excited by the overworld prospects. Of course if the rumors are true that this has become a PS4 project, that would likely remove a lot of the technical burden in making this vision a reality.
