Uncovered: Final Fantasy XV Big Reveals

Final Fantasy XV has gone through a bumpy road for development, but a recent event helped change everything for the better: Uncovered. Located at the Shrine Auditorium near USC in Los Angeles, everything was presented in a beautiful setting which we had the pleasure of attending.

The event played off the theme of revealing 14 items throughout. Here’s what each reveal was:

​1. The first unveil, was possibly the most pleasant. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, was in attendance and gave the audience a few words. He expressed excitement in the upcoming game and essentially passed on the torch to the new guys, which was very touching.

2. There was a brand new trailer that was shown off, which helped show a little more variety from the game and most importantly, showed off some giant titan creature at the end!

©Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.

3. The official logo was then revealed. Being done by Yoshitaka Amano, the same person who has done the logos (and many other designs as well) for the franchise, it has the very familiar elegant style that we come to expect. There was a twist, though! This logo is the first to be completely rendered in 3D, which helped to show a lot more detail and a lot more depth to the design. It was quite stunning. To make matters even more exciting, Yoshitaka was in attendance as well! To escalate even further, Nobuo Uematsu, the composer for the franchise all the way to about Final Fantasy X, had recorded a special message of encouragement just for the event. He wasn’t able to attend due to Distant Worlds scheduling conflicts, unfortunately.

4. From the previous trailer, we were presented with a beautiful cover of the song ‘Stand by Me’. For those who didn’t recognize who performed, it was actually Florence and the Machine. She even had a special message video presented as well.

5. In the next bit, we were presented with…Chocobos! Not only was the car presented as a more dynamic form of travel than normal (complete with a radio station which plays various old Final Fantasy tracks), the Chocobos were presented with some new abilities too. The main neat things were that they can glide now, and they can do a sort of ‘drift’.

6. A nice little trailer was shown off with a presentation of some of the various environments from the game. To help show off the engine and the beauty (and you can bet that it’s gorgeous), we also got to see some different weather effects and various times of the day as well.

7. The next reveal is when things got really exciting. We were presented with a trailer for a brand new anime mini-series called ‘Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV’ which will expand on the relationship of the four main characters prior to the events of the game. It has some really high animation quality and looks really promising. It’ll be released over-time in 5 parts as we approach the release of the game. The first part is already available on YouTube, and is linked above.

8. To continue to keep the ball rolling, they announced a brand new CGI movie called ‘Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV’. This one is a feature-length film that’s being released for free for digital download and for stream. It’s going to run concurrently with the game but cover events involving Noctis’ father and related characters (Noctis is the main character of the game). It’s slated for a release sometime before the game.

9. During the trailer for Kingsglaive, a really awesome Audi car was shown. This special car in the movie is actually going to have a single real-life counterpart built. No details on whether it would ever be purchasable or at least how we could see it were revealed.

10. Three characters in the movie who were prominently featured were Luna, King Regis and Nyx are being voiced by Lena Headey, Sean Bean and Aaron Paul respectively. Lena Headey was present to talk a little, as was Aaron Paul. Unfortunately, Sean Bean could not make it but was able to have a special video presented.

11. Mini-games have been a staple in the franchise, so the new mini-game was shown off. It seemed like some kind of a cross between pinball and Galaga combined together. The twist is that this game, Justice Monsters Five, will be available for download and play on Android, iOS and Windows 10 at some point before the main game’s release. They indicated the mobile game will interact with the main game somehow, but no details were revealed about this.

12. Thanks to Square-Enix’s recent success with releasing demos which show off gameplay while presenting a standalone story (Bravely Default and Bravely Second), Final Fantasy XV will get the same treatment via the ‘Platinum Demo – Final Fantasy XV’. This demo is completely free and is already available for download on both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Completing this demo will also enable the use of Carbuncle in the full game. The game revolves around Noctis as a child with his friend the Carbuncle.

13. Of particular interest was the announcement of two collector’s editions of the game. There’s a Deluxe Edition that comes with a beautiful steelbook case, the game, a Blu-ray of Kingsglaive and some DLC @ $89.99 (https://store.na.square-enix.com/product/398311/final-fantasy-xv-deluxe-edition-xbox-one). The really exciting one is the Ultimate Edition, though. This hefty beast comes with the same things as the Deluxe, plus: a 192 page artbook; another special steelbook case which houses a Blu-ray of Brotherhood (which includes a special 6th episode) and a special soundtrack including tracks from the anime and movie; an exclusive Play Arts Kai figure of Noctis; additional DLC on top of what’s in the Deluxe Edition. This one runs at a hefty $269.99 and was only available on the official Square-Enix store (https://store.na.square-enix.com/product/398306/final-fantasy-xv-ultimate-collector-s-edition-ps4). These went up for order at 9pm PST the night of the event. The Ultimate Edition was limited to 30,000 copies, and sold out within minutes.

14. The final announcement was the release date: September 30, 2016. Amusingly, the hosts poked fun at GameStop for leaking the release date before the Uncovered event.

Finally, the director of Final Fantasy XV, Hajime Tabata, stepped up to give some final words. As was expected, he announced that there was actually a final, fifteenth, reveal. It was another epic trailer, which ended showing that the group’s car in the game actually functions as an ‘airship’ as well, since it can fly. It was a very glorious end to a very exciting event. Thanks to the hosts (who were really funny) and the really good flow of content, the event was a resounding success. There were no hitches during the presentation, and they managed to create a lot of hype. In fact, they even managed to get me immensely interested in the game. I haven’t been interested in a Final Fantasy game since after Final Fantasy X launched, so that was a major feat.

Keep an eye here as we continue to present coverage of all the Final Fantasy XV products as they come out.

- Teepu

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Official Final Fantasy XV Site: http://www.finalfantasyxv.com/
Official Square-Enix Site: http://na.square-enix.com/us/hom