Yep, back in early 2006 (pre E3) FFXIII was running on the PS2, just like 10 years before Shenmue was a Saturn game. The characters are different but the combat system is almost the same. Not bad considering PS2's aging hardware, and the fact that it's a test version and nowhere as polished as a final version.
Wow, awesome find Very interesting was it supposed to be cel shaded or was that just the result of a very very early build?
The Cellshading was probably just done as a temporary solution to just make stuff visually stand out from one another while testing/tweaking the battle system. A lot of games (and engines) have had ways of quickly rendering stuff in various alternate ways for similar purposes. +If you look at the fantastic name choices and the general look of things in the cellshaded images, it seems like they're just tweaking FFX-2 assets. Shuffling pieces around to create "new" characters + using cellshading instead of texturing: to allow for minimal resource requirements. Probably so that any battle engine code can be tested with "proper" graphics and run smoothly without the graphics department potentially dragging things down with unoptimized assets. That's what this seems like anyway, battle engine tech demos and not anything that represents the graphical/design direction of things. Recycled FFXII assets, I presume.
