All evidence at hand points to ‘Yes,’ and it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened.

You may recall back over a year ago now, Square-Enix was caught red-handed falsifying Final Fantasy XIII screenshots, all in an effort to keep the reality of the Xbox 360 version of the game hidden from view. The entire debacle was quickly shuttered by PR as clearly a mistake on their part.

Unfortunately for them, however, the damage had been done. Instead of releasing proper direct feed screen captures from the Xbox 360 version of Final Fantasy XIII, someone took the time to edit an entire batch of PlayStation 3 shots, replacing the familiar L1, Triangle, Circle, Square, X buttons, with the ones from Microsoft’s console. With both console’s ‘sets’ released, it was only a matter of time before people connected the dots and realized that each version’s image was exactly the same, right down to damage being dealt to on-screen enemies.

In truth, both versions of Final Fantasy XIII were far from identical. The Xbox 360 port suffered from sub-HD resolutions and heavy framerate loss, and ended up being a far cry from the original PlayStation 3 game as a result. Based on what we’ve seen at E3 2011, Final Fantasy XIII-2 isn’t exactly equal on both platforms either…

So here we are, with XIII-2, and a few minutes of detective work proves that Square-Enix is possibly doing the same thing all over again. Below you can see two images that are exactly the same in every single aspect. The only thing different is the L1 button has been swapped for the LB button to indicate that it is from the Xbox 360 version. Everything else is the same, right down to the damage numbers and particle effects on screen. There’s no doubt that this image has been modified. As an interesting note, Famitsu’s 4 page spread on the game had the same image, with Japanese text. As the PlayStation 3 version is once again the lead platform here, it’s only obvious that the original shot came from that system.

What do you think? Square’s response, if any, will be interesting.