Arc System Works announces Xblaze at BlazBlue tournament
Arc System Works today announced Xblaze (working title), a new game and the first title in what the BlazBlue, Guilty Gear and Persona 4: Arena developer is calling the “Adventure Project” series. This means that Xblaze is most likely a visual novel, like the majority of ADV-genre games in Japan – Steins;Gate is part of 5pb’s “Science Adventure series”, for instance.
No platform has been named, but Xblaze is currently scheduled for a 2012 Winter release in Japan.
A brief teaser trailer was shown at BlueRevo, an official BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II tournament where the best players from all over Japan (and overseas; at least one team was from the US) competed in teams of 3. The full tournament and announcement was streamed live over Nico Douga as a pay-per-view feed earlier today.
But if you just want to check out the teaser trailer for XBlaze, well, you’re in luck – Famitsu.com uploaded some direct-feed footage of the teaser, embedded here below for your viewing pleasure:
Some stills from the trailer (from 4Gamer):
The teaser says that Xblaze is yet another story about the “Azure” (the crux of BlazBlue’s story revolves around a weapon known as the Azure Grimoire). However, according to 4Gamer, Xblaze may or may not be directly related to the BlazBlue games as we know it – BlazBlue producer Michi Moritoshi was rather coy when he went on stage to unveil the game.
Moritoshi also mentioned that a second title in the Adventure Project series is also in the works. As for actual BlazBlue news, he hopes to be able to announce something at another major event soon.