One of Square Enix's announcements in the recent GDC 2008 event is the renaming of their new in-house new graphics engine, White Engine. Now officially known as Crystal Tools, Square Enix's engine doesn't only cater to the PlayStation 3. It has turned multiplatform, and even supports the Nintendo Wii. More details in the full article.

Is Square Enix's upcoming RPG title Final Fantasy XIII going to be delayed? During the recent Square Enix fiscal meeting, it was revealed that the development of FFXIII's White Engine is moving at a sluggish pace, which could possibly translate into another delay for the next installment in the Final Fantasy franchise.

There's a positive update on this report. Read the full article for more!

Not meaning to rain on everyone's parade, but perhaps hoping to play Final Fantasy XIII by next Christmas may have been a bit too much to ask for, and Tetsuya Nomura himself says so.

In a recent interview with Famitsu, Nomura and his Square Enix crew have said flat out that FF XIII won't be coming out by 2007. We're just guessing at this point, but it may be that they still have to finish some other pending projects first before rolling up their sleeves for this new FF installment which everyone has been drooling over.

Part of their to-do list include Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Mix for the PS2, It's A Wonderful World and FFXII: Revenant Wings for the DS, FFVII: Crisis Core for the PSP, and the director's cut version of the movie, "Final Fantasy Advent Children."

Sigh. It's going to be a long wait, but as we once said in the case of Shigeru Miyamoto and Super Mario Galaxy, if they want more time to work on the game, then we're happy to wait. Besides, there's at least the demo. Maybe.

In the meantime, we'll amuse ourselves with dreams of Square Enix harnessing the full power of the Lifestream Cell processor, and thoughts of a White Engine and Unreal Engine 3 hybrid in the hands of the masters.

We know that speculation about what gameplay in Final Fantasy XIII will be like is moot, simply because development of the game is already underway. However, one can't deny that theorizing and speculating is very much entertaining. So allow us to dig through the gameplay mechanics history of the seemingly endless Final Fantasy series and from that let's try to paint a picture of what we could expect from the world of Fabula Nova Crystallis.

Since we're looking at the history of something, let's start with the present. What do we know about the game so far? Let's start with the latest info on FFXIII and work backwards. After all that backtracking, let's take a look at how game play mechanics and general gameplay evolved from the first FF moving forward all the way to today's latest hour eating installment, time-warp-of-a-game, Final Fantasy XII. (The current talk of the town as far as online comic strips are concerned.)

FFXIII and its PS2 roots

The latest bit of details we could find on FF XIII comes from IGN. They report that they managed to get (from Japanese publication Degenki,) a few comments from Motomu Toriyama and Tetsuya Nomura about FF XIII and FF Versus XII.

We find out that the game was originally developed for the PS2, and experienced an almost complete engine overhaul when it underwent a platform change after May 2005. Toriyama says:

The areas that we kept are the Fabula Nova Crystallis world, the pieces of the mythology related to FFXIII, and the character details. On the other hand, the battle and game-play systems were restarted from scratch when production moved to the PS3.

We also found out that the game was originally developed by the X-2 team. However, in an effort to take advantage of the PS3 hardware, many new staff members are now taking part.

Keep this PS2 origin in mind, we'll talk about it again later.

The full article awaits after the jump!

Here are some more new screens of the much awaited Final Fantasy XIII for the next-gen console, PlayStation3. An article about the upcoming FFXIII game talks about the use of an original "White Engine" for the game.

The White Engine is a graphics engine that has been utilized to develop the image quality which the Final Fantasy series is famous for. High quality images produced by the engine will be one of the main attractions (again) of the game, along with the other new features showing a different sense of speed for this game.

Hopefully, this game (which was originally created for the PS2) will be worth the wait.