Kid Icarus: Uprising is divided up into chapters. Each chapter lets you select a difficulty setting that you’re comfortable with, but this being a Masahiro Sakurai game, it goes above and beyond the basic requirements into outlandishly customizable territory.
In Kid Icarus: Uprising, the difficulty for each chapter is referred to as “intensity level”. Intensity ranges from 0.0 – 9.0 for each chapter, and the default intensity is set to 2.0. The catch is that increased intensity nets you more powerful weapon drops from defeated enemies, as well as more Hearts. Hearts can be used to purchase new items.
Increasing intensity isn’t a straightforward process of simply moving a slider without consequences, though: it’s actually a clever form of gambling. You increase intensity by betting Hearts and placing them into the Fiend’s Cauldron. If you’re defeated during the chapter, you’ll lose some of your Hearts and intensity will be lowered.
Nintendo say that Kid Icarus: Uprising has nine categories of weapons, ranging from Bows to Claws to Blades. Screenshots show that the Blade category has the Samurai Blade and Royal Blade weapons.
You can see some of these at work in the new trailer embedded above, and in the screenshots below. You can ride vehicles, too, like the Exo Tank:
Kid Icarus: Uprising is scheduled for release on March 23rd in North America. Pre-ordering the game from “select retailers” will net you a free download code for 3D Classics: Kid Icarus on the Nintendo eShop.
