She has no name, but her face will be burned into your memory forever. White hair drapes over a worried, slightly fearful expression, and she awkwardly fumbles with the assault rifle in her hands. A simple gold band adorns her ring finger. Seventeen minutes from now, she will be dead, plunging to death off a destroyed bridge. And it’ll be entirely your fault.

Welcome to Final Fantasy XIII, the newest and most explosive entry in the long-running JRPG series. We’re sitting in developer Square Enix’s Tokyo headquarters, having the world’s first hands-on with the game: 20 glorious minutes of blockbuster cutscenes, frantically fast turn-based battles, and cooler-than-thou characters and monsters beating the entire spectrum of colors out of each other.

The developer outlines the story in broad strokes. You play a ragtag group of resistance fighters tackling an all-powerful governmental body. Things are not going in your favor. In this slice of gameplay, we’re taking part in an unsuccessful rescue attempt of a train full of prisoners. Sudden and massive military intervention puts us at a huge disadvantage, and we’re forced to draft those we were originally here to save…with fatal consequences.

It’s a familiar plot setup that’s true to the series’ heart: echoing the David-vs.-Goliath myth. Yet, even after 22 years, each new take feels surprisingly fresh. It’s telling of the series’ quality that even an unnamed casualty of war can tug at the heartstrings so harshly.

Yes, it’s a JRPG, but FFXIII is unlike the other genre entries the Xbox 360 has seen in the last few years. This is the real deal, the Muhammad Ali of the genre, and it’s finally stepping back into the ring to show the pretenders the champ is back. And he’s ready for a title fight.

The Final Countdown

It has been in development for what seems like forever now (in actual fact, it’s not even three years since the original E3 announcement). Not to mention the world is still reeling from the surprise reveal last year that the company had brokered a deal with Microsoft to release Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360 as well as PlayStation 3.

There’s a chance your familiarity with the Final Fantasy name extends only to Final Fantasy XI, the company’s attempt at shifting the franchise into World of Warcraft MMORPG territory. This isn’t the best first impression, so let’s take this moment to re-introduce you.

If your conception of JRPGs and Square Enix comes from the likes of Enchanted Arms, The Last Remnant, or Infinite Undiscovery, banish them from your mind. Final Fantasy is to them what 50 Cent is to Gears of War — what Legendary is to BioShock. There’s a reason this is the premier JRPG series out there. It has the biggest budget, it’s got the production values, it’s got the lengthy development times. In Japan, only Mario arguably rivals the amount of tie-in merchandise and fan base of Final Fantasy. Simply put, this franchise is bigger, better, and bolder than anything else — on either side of the Pacific.

Each game in the series starts afresh with a new world, new characters, and new storylines. Here it’s not just one, but two worlds. Humanity has built a high-tech civilization on the moon planet of Cocoon, protected from the monster-filled world of Pulse that Cocoon orbits. The story follows a resistance group called Nora, which is trying to stop Cocoon’s government from extraditing its opposing populace to exile and certain death on Pulse.

Of course, that plotline will be wrenched open to uncover a multitude of smaller storylines and massive twists as the 40-hour-plus adventure unravels. The beauty is Final Fantasy’s balance between almost-operatic world-changing/world-ending events and the soap opera of intergroup relationships as the characters develop, interact, and clash.

A Brave New World

Our 20-minute demo recounts a rescue attempt aboard a high-speed train from two perspectives. The opening FMV sequence alone packs so much eye candy that you’d think it was raining piñatas: a standard military check of the prisoners onboard whips into a fantastic fight-fest as PSCICOM discovers the rebel (and one of the game’s central characters) Lightning and her partner Sazh Katzroy hiding among them. This bit, and the subsequent explosion that sends train carriages tumbling onto separate parts of a multi-layered track system, sets up the two-pronged escape/defense sequence.

The first has Lightning and Sazh escaping the wreckage with a massive mechanical monster in hot pursuit, working their way through wave after wave of patrols. Halfway through, the scene shifts to a group of resistance fighters led by the bandanna-wearing Snow leading the charge from hastily built barriers to a group of civilians — one of whom, with a shock of white hair, stands out from the crowd.

Graphics-wise, the game is bested only by Gears of War 2, and the differences between FMV and in-game models are negligible, which makes Square’s attention to facial animations all the more astounding. The voice-acting in our demo was Japanese, but we understood much of what was happening by characters’ mood and thoughts, read easily from just looking at their faces.

As in all Final Fantasy games, there’s a divide between the field screen, where you can control your character with the left stick and progress through towns and explore dungeons, and the battle screen, which appears once you encounter an enemy. In the latter, your characters are static and are moved like an interactive chess game.

Admittedly, the former was fairly linear, with both Lightning and Snow charging along narrow walkways to their destination, but Square Enix have confirmed that other areas will be more exploration-based. But our demo was more about showcasing the fighting system, which is a huge factor in making or breaking JRPGs.

Fighting For The Future

FFXIII puts a twist on the series’ Active Time Battle System. This time around, it’s a real-time system, letting characters move once a Time Gauge (which is partitioned into three segments) is a third full. Every attack from a drop-down menu has a number next to it, designating how many segments it’ll take. Obviously, the more powerful attacks take more time, so you could stack three normal psychic attacks or one big magic attack.

Characters can attack simultaneously, meaning a three-hit combo can be canceled with a stronger attack from the opposition, so to execute successful attacks you need to learn your enemies’ attack patterns. Because there are no set battle lines, characters intermingle as the finishing animations of the various attacks see fit. With larger magic attacks having a wide dispersal, you have to keep an eye out for when opponents group together — though this works for your enemies as well.

The crazy thing is just how fast it all moves. The Time Gauge charges in around 10 seconds, and letting attacks chain together keeps the flow of battle moving at a rapid pace. There’s no waiting around here, and to the casual viewer, it’s chaotic and confusing; to the player, it’s chess with the finger firmly on the fast-forward button.

We survive the mechanical destroyer, make good our escape, but also lose most of the civilians we were protecting as the bridge explodes under artillery fire, watching helplessly as our charges plunge to their deaths. We watch the ending cinematic, which leaves more questions than answers, and without hesitation, we tap Start the moment the title screen fades back into view.

Repeated plays let us dig deeper into the battle system, although Square Enix is keeping a lot sectioned off from this gameplay slice. Whether the chaotic nature of the battle is balanced by a quick-paced but ultimately strategic turn-based system is the decisive factor in keeping Final Fantasy at the forefront of the genre. We’re already sold on the characters, setting, and music. We trust in Square Enix when it tells us that it’s still working on the system until it’s perfect. We can wait, though. After all, we’ve been waiting this long for a real Final Fantasy entry on Xbox. And really, what’s one more year?