Final Fantasy XIII-2 actually looks like an improvement on the original

If that pans out, it'll be quite a change from Final Fantasy X-2, which failed miserably (see this post, third paragraph). Though, to be fair, Final Fantasy X was a much higher standard to meet (I'd still rank it the best of the lot).

I live in hope that there will be a) towns and b) a user-controllable airship. The lack of the former wrecked the flow of the game; RPGs aren't first-person shooters, there's supposed to be time to go around talking to people and getting a feel for the plot. In FFXIII it was just a rush of ultra-linear* dungeon-crawling with monotonous battles that required way too much button-mashing for their near-automatic mechanics followed by a cutscene followed more ultra-linear dungeon-crawling followed by a cutscene followed by more ultra-linear dungeon-crawling with monotonous battles followed by a cutscene... you get the idea. Come to think of it, if just strung the cutscenes together with new onces detailing the major battles, it would work better as a movie than a game.

The lack of an airship was just an unjustified breach of Final Fantasy tradition that further undermined the cohesion of the series. And in this game, unlike Final Fantasy XII, an airship would have actually been useful! Activating all the Cie'th teleport stones on Pulse is a huge pain in the ass! Getting an airship to fly between Orphan's Cradle, Edenhall, and Pulse instead of portals would have been easy as pie for the developers, would have made more sense, and would have been a boon to the players if it could drop you off at different points in Pulse. Or, God forbid, fly freely like in FF I-IX! And yes, you can do that in games without the ability to walk on an overworld map; see Secret of Mana I & II, or Lost Odyssey for that matter.

Back to the subject at hand, the trailers has gotten me looking forward to the game. Hopefully they'll improve the battle system. The plot looks more interesting than the original, though its hard to tell at this point (I'm sure one couldn't have predicted from the trailers that the heroes would do everything the gods Fal'cie wanted every step of the way while knowing they were doing it even to the point of killing Orphan and releasing a genocide only for said genocide to averted by a massive Deus ex Machina). Oh, and Kaias still reminds me of Cid Reines, though apparently he's unrelated. Also, his identity as a Time Agent Who Can Never Die sounds familiar.

*Final Fantasy X took linearity as far as it could go and pulled it off brilliantly. Final Fantasy XIII took it much further and didn't.