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Halo: Reach gets 10 new screenshots | Call of Duty: Black Ops Hardened and Prestige editions confirmed | Halo: Reach announcement revealed | Xbox 360 Slim 250GB hard drives to be sold separately | Ice-T: Hates Medal of Honor, loves Kane & Lynch 2 | Vanquish gets Casual Automatic and God Hard difficulties | Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock songlist thus far | Gears of War 3 'Save/Kill Carmine' shirts now available | OXM subscription is half-price! | Xbox 360 Slim and PS3 Slim do battle | Blacklight: Tango Down nationwide tournament kicks off next month | BioShock 2 gets patched up | Kinect no good for flight games says Ubisoft | Battlefield: Bad Company 2 gets two more maps | What has been the biggest Xbox Live Arcade seller this year? | Xbox Live Arcade overcame slow start this year | Madden NFL 11 Terrell Owens screens revealed | Microsoft defends Kinect price | Halo PC unlocks Halo: Reach item | Transformers: War for Cybertron DLC hits today | Kane & Lynch 2 gets three new trailers | Red Dead Redemption heading to Japan | THQ creating yet another WWE franchise | Lord of the Rings and Smackdown hits Games on Demand | DJ Hero 'increasing DJ equipment sales'

On the site today - News: Halo: Reach gets 10 new screenshots http://bit.ly/agUjBR

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Video

Launch Player

The Dark Eye: Demonicon ³⁶⁰

Red Dead Redemption ³⁶⁰

Preview

Resonance of Fate

Format Xbox 360

Developer Tri-Ace

Publisher SEGA

Genre Role Playing

4-Mar-2010 Tekken a bullet to the heart of the RPG

6 Comments

Fed up with the JRPG clich�s of swords, sorcery and snail-paced battles? So is tri-Ace. Over the course of an afternoon with the Japanese developer and its new title, we discover two things about the phrase 'traditional RPG'.

One, it bridges the translation barrier without needing a middleman and two, the developer creases up laughing every time the phrase is muttered. The reason for the laughter is because the Star Ocean: The Last Hope developer has seen how much of an unpleasant joke the JPRG genre has become. Like Final Fantasy XIII, Resonance of Fate (known as End of Eternity in the developer's home country) has dumped some of the genre's traditional trappings and tried to inject some adrenaline into the proceedings.

Swords and sorcery are replaced with guns and hand grenades, in a steampunk setting. The opening cut-scene is all Tekken - leather jackets and quick edits of bullet-riddled battles. The game's battle system continues that cinematic approach, with trigger-operated weapon changes and quick-reaction button presses to dodge gunfire and aerial attacks.

The combat system is hugely complex. A mixture of turn-based and real-time combat, it's packed with terminologies, tutorial-
taught attack systems and team-based charging specials, which all stream past in vast waves of gibberish. Even tri-Ace admits the Japanese-only demo had the usual happy JRPG hardcore scratching their heads. We were barely getting our head round it after a combat-heavy hands-on, but there's a vibe that the complexities will yield a very different, very interesting battle system.

The company is trying something new with the world map as well. The game's set on the human-created tower of Basel which looks like a multi-levelled checkerboard. To progress you need to collect board pieces to unlock pathways to different towns and dungeons, giving you a degree of choice in what you wish to tackle or work towards next.

One of our pet RPG hates is that for a genre that's all about customisation and upgrades, it's odd that your adventurers only wear one outfit throughout their 70-hour quest. Hooray, then, for towns that will have boutiques to let you customise your characters with outfits that will somehow affect gameplay (plus, you'll flirt better with NPCs).

You'll be seeing how well this all works soon, with a release date just a couple of months away. Its combination of classic RPG fare with massive towns to explore and NPCs to interact with, alongside a streamlined battle system, makes it a curious attraction. Whether it's going to have enough to keep you entertained past a clothes swap for the hundredth time still remains to be seen.

Gillen McAllister