Enjoy the Art of the Final Fantasy XIV Reboot

Giuseppe Nelva October 14, 2011 12:54 PM EST

With the announcement of the Final Fantasy XIV 2.0 reboot, Square Enix also shared a large batch of artwork and preliminary design of items, characters, equipment an environments that will appear in the game between now and the beginning of 2013.

Most of the art pieces show the peculiar and beautiful style of the game’s art director Akihiko Yoshida, and whether you’re excited about the reboot or not, they’re worth checking out.

There’s a lot of good stuff to see. The artifact armors for Warriors, Bards, Paladins, White Mages, Black Mages, Dragon Knights and Monks and several weapons, including the Moogle Sword and the Moogle Rod, that will be presumably transform like Serah’s bow in Final Fantasy XIII-2, and might be the reward for the uopcoming Malevolent Moogle primal battle.

In addition to that we can see the new race/gender combinations that will be introduced in 2.0 (Male Mi’quotes, Female Roegadyns and Female Highlanders), new Primals (Odin, Garuda and Leviathan), new monsters (Knight, Cyclops, Shahagin and Chimaera), the completely redesigned maps for four zones (Coerthas, Thanalan, Black Shroud and La Norsca, funny how some of the text is blacked out to avoid spoilers) and a whole lot of concept art for new landmarks.

Between the new landmarks we can see a massive floating imperial stronghold, a fortress for the “frontlines” PvP area that actually teases the inclusion of siege engines like catapults, the new floating coliseum that will appear near Limsa Lominsa, the geological anomalies that will mark the beginning of the seventh Umbral Era, an underground temple within the Ixali stronghold that will supposedly be extremely challenging and quite a few other charming amenities.

Of course there’s also the concept screenshots of a battle in Version 2.0, that not only features extremely impressive graphics, but also a very sleek UI (with a lot of features that aren’t available in the current interface), epic weapons with shiny effects, a chocobo taking part into the battle, the new title system and a few very familiar names. It’s very hard not to be impressed looking at it, while we’ll have to see how the game will actually look on our screens.

You can enjoy the full resolution artwork in the gallery below: