[Video game] Final Fantasy XIII-2: New Trailers and Adult Hope! O.O

I'm a BIG fan of the Final Fantasy series and had totally fell in love with the protagonist Lightning from the latest installment FFXIII~ (*sparkly eyes*) She's the strong and cool female character that is the opposite of many RPG female characters (usually the healer... or magician...). So when I found out few months back there there will be a second game I got really excited~ X3

Lightning and her new boyfriend??

Lightning in cool new armor, Sara out of school girl gear

FFXIII-2 (official website) is said to take place 3 years after the original... and the main character this time round is Sara, Lightning's sister (now.. she's a more typical female RPG character... at least her weapon of choice is a bow... :T). Sara is joined by this "mysterious" boy call Noel... whom suspiciously wears the same tribal gear that Fang did in FFXIII.... (perhaps they are related.... or he had been a younger version of the original design for Fang who was suppose to be a male character....) From the new trailers (one of them linked below) it seems that this time round the story will be very convoluted with time travel involved... (reminds me of the classic Chrono Trigger~) hope they do a good job with the time travel... and not leave serious loopholes in space-time continuum story... X3 

Moving on, apparently most of the game controls, style and battle system has supposedly stayed the same... with added bonus of stylized cinematic fight scenes where you madly press ABYX and the LR buttons when they pop up on screen (similar to the FFVIII limit break system?), which would be interesting~ since the fight scenes can start to get a little boring with constant pressing of the A button.... There has also been a new implementation where you can recruit monsters as your pets to fight alongside you in battles (thus bypassed the need to create new buddy characters that you won't end up using as the ultimate trio) They also brought back Moogle the cute white flying animal that was used a save points in older series of FF... but this time round the Moogle turns into Sara's weapon... (@-@;) hmmm.... not sure how that works....

If you had paid attention while playing the trailer above... you may have noticed that Hope returns in this installment not only as his cute little self... but also as a grown up version wearing a tie~ <3 He also sounds a lot hotter and mature.... though he still uses a boomerang as his weapon.... can't they have made the boomerang at least bigger and more manly or something.... :S (Snow also comes back with a new style too.... not really a big fan of his new style... but perhaps that could change as more photos and videos are released)

Grown up Hope~ <3

Anyways, seeing this today is funny 'coz one of the cosplay couples that came up when I was searching for tall girl short guy pairing... was Lightning and Hope! X3 I love Lightning~ so would've been happy to cosplay as her (though her costume would have been hard to make... :T) but hubby wasn't so hot on the idea of playing little Hope... XD And while googling images of Lightning and Hope, to my surprise, there were a lot of fan art of the adult Hope (doing stuff with Lightning~ >/////<) haha~ not sure if the FF makers will really pair up Lightning and Hope in the game though~ X3 (seems like Lightning is spending most of her time in the trailers fighting a guy version of her....)

Can Hope capture Lightning's heart this time round? XD (just kidding~)

Hope ganbatte! there may still be hope for you to get Lightning yet~ maybe~ (>.<)q