@Jubileus,
@Slaintimez, here's a slightly tidier translation of the
Gamekyo article:
"Versus XIII continued to grow and grow on the paper to take the form of a game trilogy while no no significant technological advance was accomplished. The project consisted of a compilation of certainly excellent ideas that did not connect to each other. The first trailers were only conceptual and some elements like the opposition of Stella and Noctis and the streets of Insomnia were in Versus XIII in 2011,
the role of Stella was very FNC-heavy but the character ultimately had very little screentime, the first game of the three had the aim of rescuing Stella from Niflheim restraint. The second game focused on the recovery of Insomnia and the third game staged Noctis against the gods. The failure came mainly from Nomura's poor management, who was floundering his team with technical problems no-one could solve."
Might still be a little rough, but that cuts out the Google Translate errors. On the whole, I don't think Stella would have been that impressive from this description. Even Lightning's role in XIII-2 sounds better than this.
EDIT: Just noticed something. XIII ended up with a trilogy with that basic structure (rescue, recover, deicide), while Versus/XV was condensed into a single game. It was initially going to be the other way round!