There’s an interesting interview with the team behind Chousoku Henkei Gyrozetter, especially as it’s revealed that the (arcade) game utilises the Unreal engine and toolset. This is pretty rare from a Japanese development point of view, as they tend to use their own internal tech and tools. The reasoning behind the usage of external middleware (such as Unreal) was down to the fact that Square Enix’s internal engine wasn’t ready in time. Considering the fact that the game was a bit off the beaten track functionally also meant that they had issues repurposing Unreal (primarily designed around first and third person shooters) to work in a turn based way, though the driving sections apparently caused almost no issues. Naturally the upcoming 3DS game won’t be using Unreal but still it’s interesting to hear that a Japanese arcade game went down this route.
Now will we see a US release for this one?