Final Fantasy XIII masterminds Yoshinori Kitase and Motomu Toriyama have stated that they'd be very interested in doing a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XIII, though they're waiting to see how well the current game does in the West before dreaming up a XIII-2.
"In the past three years we worked both on the world and on the various systems," says Kitase. "Creating these systems isn’t very glamorous and can frankly be a bit boring. If we could do a XIII-2, we could direct all our attention to the story and refine what we have already built."
That would be nice. It seems, with XIII, that they spent so long working on pretty colors and a battle system so inherently contrived that it needs to play itself for you, that they forgot what an RPG should be about -- the story. As for a possible Final Fantasy XV? Again, it all depends on how XIII does.
We do not know if there will be a XV. This depends a lot on the success of XIII. Also, it is difficult to pinpoint elements that are typical Final Fantasy. They are mostly invisible: part of the DNA of the game, that everyone recognizes as typical Final Fantasy. But if there is a XV, I hope the way we wrote our characters carries over. We strived to create believable people of flesh and blood. They are not robots. And they are not super heroes. I hope this humanity is something we will see again."
The trouble with your "real" characters though, is that they're simply not remarkable. I'd take a sentient cat puppet that rides on the back of a Moogle over characters that have nothing outstanding about their personality at all.
