Square Enix Unveils Gunslinger Stratos In Japan

They’ve been teasing it for a few weeks now and today Square Enix did a full reveal of their latest new arcade concept called Gunslinger Stratos. This new arcade concept is worth highlighting as when it comes to light-gun games, this certainly breaks the mold (although I admit that I am sort of thinking of Sega’s 2Spicy when I look at this). As you can tell by the rendering above, it’s a unique title that gives the player two hand guns to wield against the other players. Graphically it looks quite modern, maybe with a little overload on the bloom but the details are all rendered on a 60″ Full HD(1080P) Plasma screen at 60fps. The guns can actually be joined together in two different ways to create more powerful and unique attacks. It is an online enabled game for 4vs4 battles and it’s slated for a Japanese release this summer. It’s being produced by Viking, which as we have pointed out before includes talent that has worked on a number of high profile arcade titles in the past, from the Mobile Suit Gundam games to Street Fighter III and others. Interestingly enough the producer wants this to be a part of trend that changes the history of arcade games. That’s a mentality I appreciate, as I want to see us moving in a direction with cool new concepts like this as well, we will have to wait and see if Square Enix will really be leading such a charge.

Whether this concept will make it overseas is always a big question mark unless they explicitly say so, although the usual pattern is they say nothing about an international release until a unit just shows up out of the blue on location test somewhere. Taito will be handling it so there is always a possibility but this does use NESiCAxLive, which so far is only being used in Japan. I imagine that from the looks of it, this is using the new Taito Type X3 hardware which we heard about last year but so far have not seen any games using it. Here’s the trailer for GS – not clear is how player movement is handled but most of the focus just seems to be on the guns.

UPDATE: Turns out that there is an analog stick built into the left gun for movement and a jump button is built into the back of the right gun. Now that reminds me of what Konami did with Metal Gear Arcade, although in a slightly less complicated way than what that turned out to be.

Pics via 4Gamer.net / Official Gunslinger Stratos Website