This upcoming sequel to the popular JRPG Final Fantasy XIII is getting a western release next year. Square Enix have officially announced that this game will hit North American shelves on January 2012.
Japan will be getting this game sooner then North America as it will be released in Japan at the end of this year in December.
This will be a more open-world game instead of the linear Final Fantasy XIII. This means that bigger maps and bigger environments. The biggest complaint gamers had with the previous game was that it was pretty linear. Director Motomu Toriyama told Famitsu after E3 that, whereas XIII was story-driven, XIII-2 is “player-driven. The player actively explores the world, and events take place based on his actions. It’s made to allow a lot of choices to be made by the player. Compared to XIII, we’re using very few prerendered scenes; it’s mostly realtime.”
The main story may take about 40+ hrs to complete but their is some sort of new game+ mode included in this sequel which will allow us to replay the game in a new sort of way. It seems like this new game+ is different then the standard new game+ that is available in so many Square Enix titles. It allowed us to replay the game while still maintaining the stats and levels of our characters as well as most of the weapons and items that we collected throughout the game. It made the game a lot easier and in some new game+ mode, their was even extra optional content not available the first time.
There are a lot more mini games expected as well. It seems like that a lot of the stuff that was discarded from XIII perhaps due to space issue will make its debut in this sequel. See the extended trailer shown at this E3 below.
Source: 1up