Holy @#$%, Final Fantasy Versus XIII Is Actually a Game and Not Just a Collection of CG Videos

Final Fantasy Versus XIII was announced back in E3 of 2006 — nearly  five years ago. In all that time, there’s never one been any video showing any gameplay… until today. Get up to 3:15 or so in the above video (you have to get past some standard Final Fantasy sulking scenes and sulking next to a cute girl scenes first) and you’ll see the game in action for the first time. I’m kind of excited, but I’m also wary of Square Enix breaking my fucking heart again. So here’s what I cautiously like about it:

? I like that director/character designer Tetsuya Nomura has matured to the point where his characters don’t dress up in 900 unnecessary belt buckles, but do wear full pants.
? I like that the combat appears to be an action-RPG mix of Kingdom Hearts and FFXII. Letting the player manually attack while the other party members are programmed sounds just about perfect.
? I like that in three minutes, this video showed a game world that was infinitely more vast, complex and interesting that everything I saw in the first 25 hours of Final Fantasy XII.
? Finally, I like to think that the reason this game is called Versus XIII is because Nomura also hates the sham that was FFXIII, and is determined that his game will fucking crush it — hence the “versus.” I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but so far, so good.