Square Enix is releasing their latest smartphone game, SINoALICE, by creative director Yoko Taro on June 6, and 4Gamer shared a sneak peek at some new gmaeplay footage featuring freelance writer Mafia Kajita.
Upon starting out the game, Mafia Kajita says the Drakengard and NieR vibe is immediately noticeable from composer Keiichi Okabe’s music. Furthermore, the download bar is marked with “downloading desires,” which definitely sounds like something Yoko Taro would throw in there, which gave the freelance writer a good chuckle.
The game immediately kicks off with its gacha pulls, and you get a look at some of the SS drops for it at the 2:16 mark of the video, but the rest is still blurred out for the time being. Kajita seems to also be getting a kick out of the gacha pull screen and what goes on when you make a pull. In SINoALICE, you won’t be pulling the gacha for characters but for weapons.
Since it was actually very simple to reroll, Kajita decides to reroll once again to see if he can get an SS rarity weapon. You can get a look at what the battle is like at the 13:57 mark of the video. You can set it to “auto” so the game does everything for you, or go manual and make your own choices. The battles are all done in real-time combat.
It’s also worth mentioning that the battles are real-time multiplayer, where you’ll have up to five players join in on a party. Party members can also consist of NPC characters, so you can have a mix of AI-controlled party members and actual players. Going up against tough foes will require proper teamwork. Upon observing Alice’s character model at the clear screen, Kajita noticed there’s a lot of movement going on and wonders if it was made using Live2D. He also jokingly points out that they appear to have put tremendous focus on the subtle breast movements and the skirt length that is “barely at the limit.”
You can watch more battle gameplay at the 13:57 mark of the video. An interesting bit about the weapon rolling gacha is that some come with job classes, which not only change the appearance of the character wielding it, but it also gives them a story for the job. You can catch it at the 18:00 mark after the stubborn Mafia Kajita rerolls several more times until he unlocks Kaguya Hime with a Cleric job.
Kajita: “Just look at those breasts! Alice doesn’t have anything on her!”
As seen in other Yoko Taro games, SINoALICE offers Weapon Stories. You can check the 19:50 mark to see the list of available jobs, and also a look at the unlocked Kaguya Hime Cleric job’s list of skills. Similar to Weapon Stories, there are Character Stories, and as previously mentioned, they’ll be different for each job.
They then showed a mode to look at character models, but Mafia Kajita was disappointed at the fact that you can’t “touch” them or flip them upside down to get a peek.
SINoALICE launches in Japan on June 6, 2017 for iPhone and Android.
