thepinkfoxx:

Final Fantasy XIII heroine Lightning will be back in a new game, Square-Enix announced today. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.

Series director Motomu Toriyama spoke over an image of a rose, saying roses have many meanings. He then said that “this game is the conclusion of Lightning’s saga.“ 

Toriyama said Lightning will make her comeback, returning as a stronger character than she was in the first two games, FF XIII and FF XIII-2. Lightning is going to face her final battle, so he asked the character designer to convey the power in her eyes.

The game will offer players a lot of ways to customize their version of Lightning. Her outfits will be about more than just aesthetics. They affect her abilities. Character control will be more dynamic. She’ll be able to hang off ledges, pull herself up, jump, duck behind corners. You’ll be able to move her around in battle, a first, they said, for the series.

The game world is composed off four islands and touches on three themes: gothic, mechanical and fantasy. The concept art illustrates how different this game is from the standard FF game. The whole game runs on a time-of-day system, with a monorail that moves through it on schedule, like everything else in the world—you can get stuck in one region waiting for the monorail to take you to another island. 

The world of Lightning Returns runs in real-time. When the game begins, the world is 13 days away from the end. She has 13 days and 13 nights to save humanity. The game runs on a doomsday clock reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

The game will be out for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2013.