KOEI Tecmo Warriors

This week’s Famitsu issue also had some information about Dynasty Warriors Eiketsuden. Mostly regarding the Story. Each character you’re able to recruit will have a sub-stories. The story will have fantasy-twists. So for example we have Cao Cao holding Lixia’s Orb. Or Zhao Yun helping Sun Jian as volunteer because he got seperated from his Shu-people.
 

You will encounter a System called “Heavenly Bond Mirror” (天絆鏡) which build relations with other characters and view their sub-stories. Some characters are only available through building bonds with the Heavenly Bond Mirror. One example for this is Diaochan.

Once your bond with Diaochan is high enough, the final stage for her recruition appears on your map. These stages are not easy and even have level recommendations. They feature strong enemies like Jia Xu in this example or other people.

Special Thanks go to BlackKite for the translation, scan images and permission to use it!

In this weeks issue of the Famitsu new information for Toukiden 2 released. It introduced two new characters, which most likely are NPCs.

First we got a man named Shiki, who is a tactician from Holy Mount and commander of the Forbidden Army.

Second we have a man named Raizō, who also is a commander of the Forbidden Army. He is a very quiet and loyal man who knows how to rally his troops.

The return of the all-loved Tenko also was confirmed with some differences to the previous games. You can now raise your own Tenkos and name them. Raise the mood and affection of your Tenko to gain some benefits. If it has a high affection to you, it will bring you presents and if it has a high mood, you’re also able to travel with it! Tenko isn’t send on Expeditions anymore.

The task of going on Expeditions is now given to the mecha-dolls, that were found in the ancients ruins and repaired by Doctor. There is a chance that the mecha-dolls will be damaged in the Expedition and thus return with decreased stats. They can be repaired and enhanced by certain materials.

Other than that, two new Oni were introduced!

The four-armed Senzan’ō or “The King of Thousand Mountains”.

And Amatsu Mitsutsuka, an Oni with female shaped body and wings.

Special Thanks to BlackKite for the translation, scan images and permission to use it!

Atelier Firis: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Journey will be release in Fall 2016 in Japan on PS4 and PSVita. It is the second game of the Mysterious series where Atelier Sophie came first. The game features character designs by Noco and Yuugen. The main character is Firis Mistroot, designed by Yuugen and voiced by Kaede Hondo, who is traveling together with her older sister Learne Mistroot, designed by Noco and voiced by Azusa Sato. The outfit of Firis will change over and the concept of time exist.

The story takes place after Atelier Sophie, plays in the same world as it but is very distanced from Kilhen Bell and is about Firis’ travel, so she has no Workshop but does her alchemy while she is traveling. By the way, Julio and Leon, the outsiders of Atelier Sophie, come from the area where Firis is. The synthesis is done by a ‘Bonfire’ on your travels, so you can travel at any time and don’t have to return to your Workshop. The fields of the game will be large-scale fields, which are bigger than the previous Atelier games had with them being different areas, like mountains and snow areas.  You can set up a ‘Bonfire’ on the various fields, which will result in putting up a tent that will be something like a Workshop. The synthesis system is like in the previous games, you choose the ingredients and put them together to your liking. A new kind is introduced, called the “Superdreadnought Alchemy” which allows you to make everything possible, like a boat, even though your alchemy pot would actually be to small for it.

You can affect the fields and the story by the decisions you make, such as how you overcome some difficulties.
Example:
You can ask the carpenter so fix a bridge and when you’re being thanked you hear something about a strong monster nearby. Or you find a way around the mountain, where you discover a cave with a dangerous monster in it.

The gameplay will have a trial and error experience, because you have to carefully chose what to gather and what to take with you on your journey since you don’t have a Workshop to return to. You have to think carefully on what to carry until you visit the next town.
You jave one year to achieve the objective and once cleared you can play the game indefinitely, so your real journey begins after you achieved the objective.

The development is at 50% complete, for now.

There will be a Premium Box and a Special Collection Box. Of course a normal version too.
The Premium Box features:
– The game
– Artbook
– Soundtrack CD
– Artwork Cards

The Special Collection Box features:
– The game
– All contents of the Premium Box
– Nine Crystal paperweight cubes with facial expressions of each character
– a special theme

In this week’s issue of the Famitsu the Resonance System of Dynasty Warriors Eiketsuden was introduced. It was also shown in the Livestream before but not this detailed.

Resonance is a gameplay system which was designed to deal Massive Damage on the battlefied. You can hit a lot of units with it wiping them out in one swing. One way to fill up the Resonance gauge is to simply attack enemies on the field.
To gain the highest possible amount of damage with Resonance, you must plan your positions with the characters well as all characters in the game have one of 5 possible pattern of the Resonance range.

If characters get reactivated by a Resonance, basically them being in the range to participate in it, which works even after they moved, they gain 5 movement points, so up to 5 characters are able to participate in the Resonance, making it a huge Resonance Musou. I also already mentioned it in my report of the Livestream.

If you positioned your characters good enough, you will be able to blow a huge damage to the enemies or even wipe them out complete. You can see very high damange numbers on the picture.

Aside from the Resonance System: Lixia has the Power of Orb which can do various stuff on the battlefield, like putting the entire battlefield on fire.

Big Thank You goes to BlackKite for the Scans, Translation and permission to make an article out of it

The Famitsu issue of 19th May 2016 features Interviews with the brand leaders of Koei Tecmo. BlackKite was so kind to translate some pieces of the interviews on Twitter. I will summarize it here.

First up was Kenichi Ogasawara of Omega Force which have Brand IPs such as the Warriors series, Toukiden, Dragon Quest Heroes and more. They used to be divided into DW, SW and Other team but now they’re all a unified team so they’re able to create games with more efficient gameplay systems. It was said that they put much more power on making Dragon Quest Heroes II in order to surpass the expectations of the consumers.
Ogasawara thinks that they didn’t have much evolution (or innovation etc.) when they went from DW7 to DW8, so when they are going to reveal Dynasty Warriors 9, they want to make sure that it has a huge impact and a reveal that’s more than Fans expected. Furthermore Ogasawara laments that he won’t get a chance to be involved in making a new Nobunaga’s Ambition as he’s the brand leader of Omega Force, since now the brands are only working on their intern IPs and not on the IPs of the other brands.
Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors and Toukiden have their own IP producers which are also looking forward to take on new challenges. Omega Force wants to ‘release new contents’ with “‘collaborating with popular IPs users have long awaited for’ for this fiscal year.  Lastly Omega Force mentioned a collaboration project between Koei Tecmo IPs that could also draw new consumers into the Fanbase.

Next in line was Koinuma of Gust who has been building bridges with the company together with CEO Erikawa/Shibusawa. IPs of Gust are for example the Atelier series, Nights of Azure and more. The Gust brand is supported by the Koei Tecmo development team in Kyoto. Koei Tecmo allocated more staffs on the team because the Gust team lacked in manpower but now they have a proper development line. Keisuke Kikuchi is handling the transition in Gust team and also handles localizations while Yoshito Okamura works on new Atelier entries as Producer and Akira Tsuchiya is currently working on a new challenge which will be a brand-new IP. He also is the Director of Ar Nosurge.
There aren’t any new games announced for this fiscal year but they confirmed that they are making console and smartphone games. Additionally they can’t say anything about next years 20th anniversary of Atelier, yet but they’re considering to show something somewhen.

After Koinuma was Yosuke Hayashi of Team Ninja. Team Ninja has IPs such as Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden, Fatal Frame and more. They’re mainly making Action and Fighting games, but some of their staffs also worked on entries of Fatal Frame and Deception, so they want to utilize the knowledge from those in making new games. Staffs who worked on non-Team Ninja titles have been transferred to the respectative brand teams for now.
Team Ninja is aiming to continue releasing games that users actually want. They’re currently working on NiOh and aim for it being played by many people worldwide. The game was praised by a lot of hardcore players but has some parts in its gameplays system that were hard to understand, so they are looking into improving the pointed aspects like camera and controls.
Lastly they talked about their Dead or Alive plans. Dead or Alive 5 Core Fighters F2P has reached 6 million downloads but Team Ninja has yet another big surprised up their sleeves on that title. Finally Team Ninja is considering more new things to Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 like adding VR compatibility once the Playstation VR released and is available.

The next leader is Kazuhiro Fujishige which is the leader of Kou Shibusawa Productions which have IPs such as Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the three Kingdoms. They’re aiming to enlarge their brand in consoles and smartphones. The producers aim to establish their IPs, the existing ones (such as Nobunaga’s Ambition) and also new ones. Currently Shibusawa Productions want a big successful smartphone title so they firmly plant themselves on the smartphone game market.

The last is Mei Erikawa who is the leader of Ruby Party, which got IPs like Angelique and more. Before becoming the leader of Ruby Party, Erikawa used to supervise creative aspects and visuals for contents that aimed for girls as audience. Ruby Party plans to expand their existing IPs Angelique, Harukanaru, La Corda d’Oro and Geten Hana with Spin off titles, phone apps and media mix. There will be a Playstation Vita version of Geten no Hana, which is a PSP title, with new contents and a chinese localization of La Corda d’Oro 4. Of course they also still plan for new IPs in Neoromance series and outside of this series, meaning new titles, and lastly want to make new IPs which aim for male audience.

These are all Tweets of BlackKite summarized in one flowing text. Thank you for the translation to BlackKite and the Permission to make this. You can view the timeline of these Tweets here: https://twitter.com/bk2128/timelines/732581055253774337