Leaked Lightning Returns trailer revelations

Like a lot of people, I scrambled to try and find a working version of the leaked Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII trailer. After all, the world was supposed to be ending and instead we were getting a sneak peak at Lightning's own adventure with impending doom. And while, at the time of writing, there's still no official trailer, we've watched it enough times now to share some interesting tidbits with you!

For those not familiar with the concept, Lightning Returns places our fierce heroine in a city with only 13 days to save the world. The countdown clock will change depending on Lightning's actions, making it far less linear than the original Final Fantasy XIII was critiqued as being. To go with the new setting and role as saviour of the world, Lightning has a new outfit which you can see courtesy of member krissy:


There's much more of a free roaming environment this time around. Not quite up to the same levels as your Assassin's Creed games, mind you, but it's another step past the jump button introduced in Final Fantasy XIII-2. We were pretty excited about that here at EoFF, let me tell you! Whether or not Lightning's flips and cool parkour tricks are player controlled or mere automatic movements remains to be seen, but either way it's providing a far more visually impressive method of movement.


Battles look similar, though with only Lightning herself taking part, there will no doubt be tweaks and adjustments. From the trailer, it almost looks like an active action-oriented battle system in the vein of Star Ocean or the Tales of series has been taken, with four commands mapped to the face buttons with Paradigm Shifts allowing you to access more of Lightning's move set. No confirmation on this just yet, but the lack of any obvious ATB bar is very intriguing indeed! Three "classes" are seen during the battle scenes in the trailer: Divinity, Cerberus and Enchanter.


Square Enix has done an excellent job of teasing us with this trailer, showing a nice blend of gameplay elements and story exposition. Hope makes an appearance as a narrator, opening up more questions on how and why he is involved. For a first little morsel, this trailer is definitely tasty. We're definitely looking forward to seeing what else is revealed when Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is shown at Jump Fiesta starting today!

Here's a (hopefully) working leaked version of the trailer until the official one goes live the official trailer: