New Final Fantasy XIII footage released

Square Enix has released a brand new trailer for Final Fantasy XIII, showing impressive CGI cinematics and some very acrobatic turn-based battles.

The footage can be seen on the official Final Fantasy XIII website, either in big or small size, to use the technical terms.

The trailer is in Japanese, but the visuals set the scene well enough; an enormous and technologically advanced metropolis filled with futuristic baddies and trains that put the Virgin Bullet to shame.

Our two heroes - the acrobatic female Lightning and blonde brawler Snow - eventually meet and find themselves facing off against all manner of foes: humanoids, robo-tigers and cyborgs.

Unperturbed, our champions set about duffing up the baddies using all manner of attacks, such as hitting them high into the sky and bopping them about like punch-bags. There appears to be a reactionary system involved that makes the action feel a little more real-time, too.

Then we're back to CGI and the trailer comes to an end, with the promise of a 2009 Japanese launch.

Unfortunately we're still no closer to narrowing down European plans, and whether the completed PS3 version will be held back in order to launch simultaneously with the yet-to-be-started Xbox 360 game.