Final Fantasy XV 15 PlayStation 4 PS4 1

Seeing as there are no weeaboos in the office today, it seems like it's down to yours truly to follow-up on last night's Final Fantasy XV stream. During it, the developer touched upon a ton of new details – the types of magic that will be featured in the game, for example – but the meat of the broadcast centred on a new three minute gameplay trailer showing Noctis and crew infiltrating the Niflheim Empire.

And it looks, well, kinda rad. The clip starts out slowly with some stealth, but the figurative excrement soon hits the fan, as the game's main crew are shown dismantling dozens of armoured officers. The actual sword swinging action reminds us ever so slightly of God of War, with the protagonist moving in slow motion as he launches enemies into the air, and warps himself towards them.

One really cool touch is that you'll be able to rope your allies into the action using commands, and the camera will switch over to their point-of-view as they unleash their attack. This, alongside the ability to change weapons on the fly using the d-pad, gives the combat a frenetic quality which looks very exciting in this clip. There's some uber-powerful magic on display, too – look out for the incendiary spell.

Promising signs, then. The combat's looking fast and fluid, the visuals are stunning, and the art direction's – well, that was never really a concern, was it? We'll finally be getting a release date announcement towards the end of March, so let's hope Square Enix can use that and this new footage to kick-start some enthusiasm in the game, because it had been starting to flatline of late.

[source youtube.com]