Project X Zone Has Gigantic Battles; Thank Goodness There’s Quick Save

Namco Bandai showed me a mission in Project X Zone that takes place much later in the game. This massive battle had 48 different units on the map at once. Considering all of the allied units are pairs like Dante from Devil May Cry & Demitri from Darkstalkers plus a few triple teams there were over 80 characters on screen.

If you haven’t been following the news, Project X Zone is a strategy RPG mashup from Namco X Capcom developer Monolith Soft with characters from Capcom, Namco Bandai, and Sega games. Why are they together? Well, Chun-Li was talking about a dimensional rift, but the true answer is fan service. You’ll see it in spades with Space Channel 5’s Ulala attacking with Sega sprites and seeing .hack characters Kite & BlackRose use Data Drain as a super move. Project X Zone was fully localized with English text and Japanese voice acting. As mentioned earlier, they used the Japanese name for the Dynamite Deka/Die Hard Arcade game, which is Bruno Delinger.

Project X Zone’s battles take place on a grid and like Super Robot Taisen you move units up to enemies to attack. When you engage in a skirmish the game switches to a 2D view and you can do different attacks by pressing Y plus a direction. The goal is to chain attacks and juggle the enemy to build up your meter. When it’s full you can do an over the top special attack like a Metsu Hadouken & Shoryuken combo. The animations are presented kind of like Super Robot Taisen with cut in art before attacks. The key to fights is placing your units within two squares of each other so you can call in an assist by pressing R.

If your team has a solo unit like Arthur from Ghouls’n Ghosts or Lindow from Gods Eater Burst you can actually have five characters on the screen at the same time doing a crazy chain combo. Unfortunately most of those attacks will *miss* so you’re better off starting an attack with your main team, calling an adjacent ally, using an upwards attack to extend a juggle, summoning your solo partner, and then using a super move.

Project X Zone will introduce a handful of characters to English speaking audiences like Kurt and Riela from Valkyria Chronicles 3 and Sakura Shinguji from Sakura Wars. Nice to see Mega Man X return into the video game world for the 30th anniversary of the Mega Man series.