Played all your local arcades games a million times and want to try something a bit new… perhaps released by Square Enix? Well there is no guarantee we will actually be seeing this outside of Japan but Square Enix will be publishing a brand new Arcade game titled Gunslinger Stratos later this year in Japan, with a focus on gunplay and 4 vs 4 battles. Before going into details, first a few notes of importance:
- It is being published by Square Enix but they are not the primary developer.
- The game is being developed primarily by Byking
- The games producer however is Nobuki Kadoi from Square Enix
- World Setting and Game Concept are credited to Gen Urobuchi and Character Design is being done by Mari Shimazaki, Arco Wada and Shigeto Koyama.
As mentioned prior, the purpose of this arcade game is to bring new life to the digital shooting games that have been in arcades for many years. Instead of a single gun in battle, you are provided with dual guns which can be used in three different styles depending on how you want to attack – Double Gun, Side-style (Either machine or shot gun) or Tandem Style (Rocket launcher et cetera), each of these having different controls with the guns (They can be combined into one) and adding that diversity to the gameplay rather than just aimlessly shooting. To elaborate on the arcade booth, there will be 4v4 gameplay so each booth will be equipped with four 60″ plasma monitors and four sets of control stations. While you will obviously have to pay for play the game, you can store your data on the NESiCA mobile service, so similar to what happened with The Idolm@ster when it was in arcades – you can take your characters with you. This online service allows you to customize your character, weapons and purchase accessories which all use game points instead of the normal microtrasactions.
The game will offer you plenty of character choices (Unfortunately doesn’t seem like custom characters will be an option) and each of these will have access to different weapons altering the play style even further – with only 100 weapons in total including guns with special abilities or magic to protective equipment. As it is an online arcade game, you will also be granted the chance to battle against those not necessarily in the same arcade or city as you – with the multiplayer options including:
- Nation
- Local Arcade vs Other Team
- Personal and Cooperative Missions
Below are a couple of the images Square Enix released with the announcement, as you can no doubt tell they have chosen to make use of some real life environments for at least some of the stages.
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