I’m very happy to be writing this blog all about our Vanquish demo for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, which should be out now! For everyone at SEGA, this is very exciting news, and we hope you enjoy taking a spin on SEGA and PlatinumGames newest offering. Before we jump into the details, I want to give you a quick bit of info on the setting, the game, and then offer you a bit of a challenge.

The Story So Far…

Vanquish is set in a desperate future, one that centers around exponential population growth, a demand for resources, and a political power play from Russia that lands you in the heart of the action aboard an orbiting space station. You play Sam Gideon, DARPA Agent and co-designer of some very advanced technology – the Augmented Reaction Suit (ARS). Your mission is to work with the infiltrating military to restore order, find your fellow agents, and prevent an attack on New York City, among other American targets.

The Secret to Success

Vanquish is the newest game from the mind of Shinji Mikami, creator of such classics as Resident Evil. Known for his epic games, Shinji Mikami has taken on the 3rd person shooter in a way that only he could. Working with PlatinumGames, together they’ve come up with a very fast, very fluid, and very intense cover to cover shooter. How you operate the Augmented Reaction Suit (ARS) system and the key abilities it grants you will be the deciding factor in your success – or failure. The two abilities that I find the most useful are Boost and Augmented Reaction (AR).

The Augmented Reaction Suit, you’ll find, is incredibly fast and agile when you use Boost to navigate around the demo area. Boost allows you to dash over to save wounded marines, evade attacks, or quickly close the distance on any enemy to deliver a punishing melee attack. Boost into cover, boost out of cover – boosting is one of the best tools you have for both defensive and offensive action in Vanquish.

While Boost grants you speed, Augmented Reaction (AR) will grant you time. Time will save you in both a reactive and proactive manner – push forward with your Boost and flip on AR to destroy enemies while you dash past them. Jump out of cover into AR to line up headshots and stop a guarded threat behind cover. Roll into AR, plant your body, and focus fire at heavily guarded targets for maximum efficiency. Defensively – you’ll enter into AR when you take on too much damage, granting you a moment to kill your main threat, or evade into cover to recharge and continue the fight.

I highly recommend checking out the tutorial before jumping into the full game to see how these two abilities play out. You’ll get a chance to mess around in a safe environment and become comfortable with how the game works. Trust me, you can adapt while you play the game and absolutely get through it – but you will benefit from a bit of practice!

The Demo Challenge

So as a spot of fun, I figured I’d leave you with a challenge to see if you can best what I consider to be a very impressive clear-time on the demo. The demo, as you’ll find, runs about 45 minutes or so, depending on if you need to do a retry or not.  Our own internal producer, Keith, has become quite good at the demo from various trade shows and has a clear time of 6 minutes and 12 seconds. I challenge you to beat this time! Keith is good, but I’m betting the community will be able to best him in a few short days after release – prove me right, post screenshots if you can, and show them what community can do!

The Vanquish Demo is now available – we hope you enjoy the demo and look forward to your impressions!

Sonic Adventure, the debut Sonic title for the Dreamcast system, is coming to Xbox Live Arcade September 15th!

Gamers will be able to experience the original groundbreaking Dreamcast adventure — redone in HD – on Xbox Live Arcade for the low price of 800 Microsoft Points.

In addition to being Sonic’s debut on the Dreamcast — and the best-selling Dreamcast game — this was also the first Sonic game set in a 3D environment. Playing it now, it’s still easy to appreciate just how much the Dreamcast brought to the table. Large-scale adventure stages, multiple characters with intertwined stories, and some extremely clever & fast-paced action stages are just some of the highlights of the game.

And of course the other highlight, with an extremely devoted cult following of its own, is the Chao Garden. Chao, introduced in Sonic Adventure, are a kind of virtual pet which you raise in a special minigame area linked to each character’s adventure stage.

For those of you waiting for the game’s release on PlayStation Network, don’t worry — we’ll have more good news on that soon. Stay tuned!

(Before you start reading this blog, we recommend getting this music playing in the background!)

Finally, the release day has come. As Valkyria Chronicles II ships to stores across the US, the long wait for the sequel to the PS3 masterpiece is over.

Writing a new, lengthy piece for the BLiTZ each day has been a challenge, but one always made worth it by the amazing responses we get from you guys – the fans. We hope you’ve enjoyed the stream of info, pictures, and prizes just as much as we enjoy seeing your excitement.

We have a very special finale today to say thank you to all the fans. For following us from day 1, for supporting great titles like Valkyria Chronicles, and for getting out there to pick up and also support the second game – here is our tribute to you.

A special message for the fans – from the Valkyria Chronicles devs

Just after we began the BLiTZ, I put in a rather selfish request to the developers over in Japan, asking them if they would like to take part in our final day of the BLiTZ and write a message to the fans. The request itself was on very short notice, and I had actually only expected maybe one or two members of the dev team to write back.

Instead, they found time amidst their busy schedule to write something very special for all of you. And not just one – but a great many of them, each responsible for something unique within the series, all took time out of their day to create the following messages, just for the Valkyria Chronicles fans in the west. And here they are:

Their messages, and their role in the team:

Shinji Motoyama                  Chief Producer

We’ll be waiting for you in the new battlefield!

Takanobu Yoshino                Localization Director

Try collecting all the medals with Avan and his comrades.

Hope you like Vario!

Kazuhiro Matsuta                 Chief Programmer

We put in all you can ever want for a portable game.

Thank you for supporting Valkyria Chronicles II!

Hirotaka Kanazawa              Chief Artist

The new Valkyria Chronicles is loaded with new tanks, weapons, characters, and so much more!

Protect Gallia with your one and only Class G!

(JP message: Protect the homeland!)

Shuntaro Tanaka                  Chief Adviser

Valkyria is back!

Takeshi Ozawa                    Original Director

All Valkyria fans are my fellow comrades!!

Kohei Yamashita                  Chief Game Designer

Valkyria is THE strategy game of the century.

You’ll find out that it’s worth 100 times what you pay for, so you gotta play it!

Daisuke Tabayashi               Setting Designer

All Valkyria fans, here we go! Make way for Edelweiss!!

…Sorry, you don’t have Edelweiss this time.  But you get to customize your tank to the limits!  The magnificent world of Valkyria Chronicles and the BLiTZ system are greater than ever, so get ready for some fun!

(+ the illustration)

Akio Horii                            Map Designer

Thank you very much for supporting Valkyria Chronicles!!

And thank you, to everyone above, for taking the time to write those messages.

A call to action

As the day arrives, we hope that everyone will do their part to support the series. Whether that’s simply picking up the game, telling your friends about it, or even cosplaying VC at PAX this week – every little things helps, and collectively as fans, we can move mountains when we all do even just a little.

Thank you to the many who are already doing that – and to everyone who plans to pick up or download a new copy of the game to support Valkyria Chronicles!

A super rare finale prize!

We’ve saved the best for last. Today, we’re going to give away the huge Japanese Development Works artbook, which is worth over $60 alone and is a masterpiece filled with art and design concepts from the entire first game. Massive is an understatement.

But this one is special. This artbook has also been signed by those above – the Japanese development team, and the back inside cover has both messages from them and even a sketch of the Edelweiss all drawn onto it. To date, only two of these exist in all of the US – and you can win this one.

• To win the artbook, write a message here for the Valkyria Chronicles dev team. Make it as short or as long as you want – and let them know what you think of Valkyria Chronicles, and what the series means to you.

We’ll draw one winner at random from here on the blogs, and they’ll get one amazingly rare piece of merchandise to add to their collection!

What comes next

As the BLiTZ finishes on our end, it passes on to all of you – to the world of Valkyria Chronicles II that you can now experience, and to the battles, characters, and story that awaits.

Our support for Valkria Chronicles II is far from over, and we’ll be back soon with even more news on the upcoming DLC for the game, and some special codes to unlock new content – some exclusive to the west!

On behalf of all of our teams, thank you for joining us through the entire Community BLiTZ. If you liked it, please let us know!

Happy Valkyria Chronicles II day everyone – we hope you’ll love the game!

Hello everyone, and welcome to Day X of the Community BLiTZ! Thanks for being patient as we’re traveling around a bit and finding time to update has been a challenge. On the plus side, that travel schedule does mean we might meet you at PAX this year, and Valkyria Chronicles II will most definitely be there!

Today marks the launch of the game here in the west, but we’ve saved the big launch blog post for a little later in the afternoon. Thanks to all the great responses on the BLiTZ though, it is going to be a little more special than I thought when we started the series of updates. Stay tuned!

As we catch up on Day X, we explore the grounds of the military academy Lanseal – the place you’ll be spending almost all of your time leveling up, researching new equipment, and learning more about your fellow cadets. A few special guests from the first game might also make appearances here. Read on for all the details, our special thanks, last week’s winners, and another giveaway!

Community BLiTZ – Day X: The grounds of Lanseal

Standing tall for 217 years, the Lanseal Royal Military Academy is also Gallia’s only military academy. The “Royal” part of the name comes from the time it was created: back when Gallia was actually still a Monarchy. Records of the academy’s location show that it was not in fact built from scratch, but rather constructed around an existing old citadel, and then adding new expansions like the training grounds and the residential buildings.

Want to graduate at Lanseal? The academy uses a credit system, and on average, cadets can get through the program in approximately three years. There are two ways in: either get recruited by one of Lanseal’s scouts, who visit schools across the country looking for gifted students, or apply directly. Everyone has to pass both a written and field test, but the bar is much stricter for those applicants who are non-scouted.

Because graduates are immediately promoted to officers in the army, the thought of having a Lanseal diploma is actually quite tempting for many who want to serve their country further. This also means that the age of cadets varies widely, with some in their late teens, others in their twenties, and some in their thirties.

What’s on the campus itself? We’ll start today with the Training Grounds – a very important place for any Squad Leader, and a crucial location to making sure troops are ready for the next battle.

With a special training area designed to tire cadets with rigorous workouts, and with a drill instructor just as hard and relentless as the one from the first game, you can spend your experience here to push your unit classes onward and make them more effective in combat.

Like the first game, you level up units based on class. Scouts, shocktroopers, etc – the only new thing worth noting is that leveling up a class also levels up all advanced types of this class, meaning that leveling up scouts does in fact still give boosts to your snipers, or that leveling up Armored Techs will also make your Fencers even stronger.

Also at the training grounds, you can promote your units based on the number of credits they’ve earned in battle. If you’re missing credits, you can also check which missions offer the specific ones you need – and likewise, you can always move a character back to a previous class, provided they have the credits to do so.

Welcome to R&D! Equipped with their own facilities and a capable young woman known as Lavinia who watches over things here, R&D is a one-stop-shop for all sorts of upgrades. You can create and outfit new parts for your tank, research new guns, grenades, uniforms and armor to keep your soldiers safe, and even combine materials you find in the field to offer new, mission specific buffs to certain classes. These bonuses last for a single mission on a specific class, and you can repeat them after every single mission.

R&D is every bit as important as leveling up your squad members at the training grounds. Those of you who like tanks, especially, will find this as your home away from home at the academy. Lavinia is always around to help, and there are rumors of other cadets sneaking in from time to time here too, whether to admire the stockpiles of weapons or just to lend a helping hand.

Also on the grounds is the residential area, including Avan’s own room. Here, you can explore info about people, places, and more via a  book system that is quite similar to the one used in the original Valkyria Chronicles. You can also check up some very amazing stats – with a full on stat system that we highly recommend taking a look at. From your most used characters to the up-to-the-moment number of kills your squad has achieved, this scorebook has all the numbers you wanted to see and then some.

Finally, the shop on the campus grounds is also open for business, and they offer not only new missions but also Orders (and bread) during times when Welkin or Alicia visit. If keeping up to date and being well educated is your thing, you can also buy three different types of papers here. The Gallia Times is a regularly printed newspaper covering topics across Gallia, the Lotte Insider is Lotte’s own faux-newspaper covering the latest happenings at Lanseal, and the Encyclopedia offers a wealth of knowledge about topics from Ragnite to the Rebels.

That’s it for the tour of Lanseal – you’ll all be able to explore the academy in even greater detail when you pick up the game and arrive there soon. On to the next part of today’s BLiTZ!

Special Thanks

Today’s special thanks go to IGN, who were among the first western press to review VCII. Their score, which went up  yesterday, made all of us here extremely happy – the game received an oustanding 9/10, and was also credited with an Editor’s Choice award.

We’re glad you guys loved it as much as we do – and we’re hopeful that many other reviewers and fans alike will find it just as enjoyable.

Last Week’s Winners

Who got those awesome sets of our exclusive PAX Buttons? Please give your congrats to:

• On the SEGA Blogs: Steve Halter, who wrote:

I’m looking forward to the snow maps the most. My favorite missions in VC1 were the most challenging ones (Chapter 7!), and from the descriptions you gave, snow sounds like it will make the fight tougher. Can’t wait to play!

• On Facebook: Brennan M, who wrote:

The desert will always be my fave from VC1. Especially when the sandstorms came in. Something about them masking everyone from each other made it really epic to me.

• And on Twitter: personasama who wrote:

Chapter 13 and its trench warfare and long strip of no-man’s-land. Those trenches… I still have nightmares about them.

Congrats to all three of you! We’ll be able to ship out the buttons (as well as most of last week’s prizes) following our return from PAX next Monday!

Today’s first giveaway!

As there are two blogs going up today, the first is going to be awarding somebody with a very, very special Alicia Figurine! This figurine, however, is not part of the Yujin set, and the only way to get it was to buy the limited edition version of the original Japanese Valkria Chronicles!

I’ve been giving her a nice home on my desk, but now I think it’s time Alicia was finally given out to another fan to celebrate today, and all of the hard work that the fans have put in to helping this series.

• To enter to win this figurine, drop us a line here on the blogs with the class you think you’ll level up most at the training grounds of Lanseal!
  

As a reminder, the choices are: Scout, Shocktrooper, Lancer, Engineer, and Armored Tech.

Coming next…

Keep your eyes to the blogs – the BLiTZ Finale is almost here, and we’ve got something very special for all of you to celebrate the launch of the game!

Hot off the presses… it’s the pack front for Sonic Free Riders!

Sonic Free Riders brings full body motion controlled fast-paced boarding action, developed to take full advantage of  Kinect for the Xbox 360. You’ll be twisting and turning your way through a range of visually stunning courses in an action-packed Sonic experience unlike any other! Kinect’s unique motion sensor means Sonic Free Riders will see family and friends controlling their fully customizable hover board or bike by twisting, turning, and jumping in an exhilarating race to be first to cross the finish line.

Choosing from one of your favorite Sonic characters or your own avatar, you can reach out and grab a variety of pickups along the course. By throwing, shaking, or swinging your arms to launch your items, you can gain the competitive edge over your rivals in high octane single or multiplayer races.

Sonic Free Riders will be $49.99 when it hits shelves this holiday season.