Friday Square Enix News Roundup!

With Gamescom underway off in the wilderness of Europe (read: Germany), it shouldn't be a big surprise that there's some Square Enix tidbits coming out. We've been following the stories all week and are rolling them up right here for those of you who might have missed them. I like these roundups, personally; you can catch up on a lot of little things without cluttering our news section with tons of little posts, you know? However, you don't care about my philosophy, so here we go into the hard data:

Final Fantasy XIII
As has been the standard for this game, things are leaking out just a bit at a time. This week brings yet more character names for this upcoming release, as well as new screenshots of HorseOdin. Both names apply to more "rivals" for Lightning; no big surprise that the protagonist of a Final Fantasy game has a lot of folks that don't like her, right? The new male rival is named "Yaag," apparently; the female is, in a surprising turn towards normalcy, apparently called "Jill." You can see Odin in the same magazine scan that shows Jill—it remains to be seen whether they'll actually call the horse form of the summon Sleipnir, or ignore that part of the mythology altogether. Thanks to Yelanates for throwing the Yaag story our way.

As a final note for thirteen, The Escapist tells us that the dev team for the 360 version is aiming to get the game to us on three DVDs. Brings back memories of the Playstation era, does it not? This information is not concrete yet, as the development is not far enough along to be considered final, but Yoshinori Kitase says that three is the goal. He also says that the way things are looking, the number of discs might be the only noticable difference between the two console versions, so that's pretty good news for those of us who don't rock the Playstation 3. Now, if only Squenix would reneg on their exclusivity deal for XIII Versus...

Final Fantasy XIV
Kotaku brings us a series of Final Fantasy XIV video clips this week, by way of GameTrailers. It's mostly demo stuff, but hey, tech demos are cool. There's a demo displaying how each race runs through a variety of facial and body expressions, an archer getting pummeled by some fairly large chickens (with some low-fidelity battle music in the background that still sounds good), and a couple other attractive but not particularly inspiring gameplay videos.

Nier
As Square Enix try again with an action-oriented genre, it appears they're going a bit more towards God of War and Dante's Inferno with "mature" content, say Kotaku. The newly-debuted-at-Gamescom character Kaine appears to have a bit of a potty mouth and a fairly-standard-for-Squenix-women risque costume. Combine somewhat-inappropriate clothing with a foul mouth, and what do you get? Well, maybe something kinda hot, but just as likely something that might look like they're trying too hard to, as put by Nier's producer, expand beyond the existing Square Enix image. We'll see in 2010 when the game drops.

Source: Kotaku, FF Insider, The Escapist