In an interesting bit of news today, Square Enix announced that a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XIII will be releasing on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 ‘next winter’. Considering that winter can cross over into the next calendar year however, it becomes unclear whether we’ll see XIII-2 in 2011 or not. Not much else in the way of information has been released as of yet; only the logo, that the story will stem from the previous game, and that the battle system will be an evolution of the combat in Final Fantasy XIII.
Look, there’s also a pretty screenshot!
Lightning is admittedly looking quite awesome here. And is that an upgraded gunblade? Looks like it.
While Final Fantasy XIII did good-but-not-great critically (83 on Metacritic to date, versus FFXII’s 92), the game was a monster seller for Square Enix. Selling over 5.5 million copies by this point, it’s not necessarily a surprise to see them attempting to ride the wave of XIII’s financial success. This does make me call into question when we’ll ever see Final Fantasy XIII-Versus, as there’s been very little news at all since last year on that title. Only time will tell.
(There are HQ versions of both the logo and the screenshot available to view on the sidebar in related images. Enjoy!)
