This year during Japan Expo someone from the French Playstation Forum managed to catch up with Yoshinori Kitase and Motomu Toriyama, the producer and director duo for both Lightning Returns and X|X-2 HD, to ask them a few questions from European fans. While some of these questions are answered-to-death standards, a few promising tidbits surfaced among them.

On the subject of X|X-2 HD, the pair had declined to say just how long the collection had actually been in development (although they pointed to the original announce date for X HD), but mentioned that features specific to the Vita version could be a possibility. “We’re taking the possibility of adding new features seriously,” they say, citing that the hardware does have some potential. Also hinted-at were possibilities of changes to the user interface and music, although they pulled the classic Square Enix line of “We can’t say anything right now, so please look forward to it”.

Finally, it plainly confirmed that they have no plans of releasing DLC for the collection at this time. When asked about the inclusion of International Content, it was said that it would be included. For Europe, this means Final Fantasy X will be the exact same as they originally got it while for America this means new bosses and the Expert Sphere Grid mode among other things. With Final Fantasy X-2, it was said that the International content would be included and the “Creature Create” system was specifically confirmed. Still nothing about Last Mission, which Square Enix previously claimed they considered a ‘separate game’ from X-2 and had not made any decisions regarding its inclusion.

The Lightning Returns questions were more or less repeats, such as “How has the system changed between XIII-2 and LR?” or “Will this be the last game in the Lightning Saga?”. (The answer to that second one is yes, in case you’re a bit behind on the news) Toriyama and Kitase spoke briefly on the composition of music for the game, as well as talking about how they developed trophy support from a whole-game standpoint rather than the “main story, then end-game” approach of XIII and XIII-2. Toriyama, when questioned about the possibility of the game’s time constraints being stressful, says that he believes the game will be difficult to extend to 13 Days but that he expects it will drive players to do their best.

Of considerable note to Lightning Saga fans was a question regarding the “Lightning Ultimate Box”, a very special edition of Lightning Returns which will include all three Lightning Saga games, a selection from each game’s original soundtrack, and an art book. As a further bonus, it contains a variant version of the new Lightning Play Arts Kai figurine. This package is currently Japan-only and retails for about ¥26,000 (about €200/$263 respectively), but Kitase says it could make its way to the West if there’s a demand for it. Finally, the community manager asked about returning characters and their parts in the upcoming game.

PS Forum France: We’ve already seen some of the the main characters from the two previous games, are they going to play an important role in Lightning Returns? Will they become allies or opponents of Lightning?
Toriyama: Yes, certain enemies will reappear. One of these will be Caius, because at the end of XIII-2 there is an uncertainty that hovers around his destiny and whether he survives or not. This mystery will be solved in Lightning Returns.

Despite this, they made no mention of whether we would actually see Caius again or if he is simply mentioned during the course of the story. Lightning Returns will release on November 21st for Japan and mid-February for both North America and Europe, while X|X-2 HD has no release date beyond “2013”. The original post can be found on a blog, here.