TGS 2005: Rumble Roses XX Update

TOKYO--Microsoft has one of the biggest presences at this year's Tokyo Game Show, with its massive Xbox 360-themed booth situated front and center in the convention's main hall. Many of the upcoming console's biggest games are here and available for hands-on play, but sadly, Konami's buxom brawler Rumble Roses XX isn't among them. Luckily, a new trailer has debuted for the game, and we also managed to corner series producer Akari Uchida to get the scoop on some of the game's new modes and features.

The biggest update in the Rumble Roses sequel is the inclusion of four-girl tag team matches, which Uchida says have been enabled by the power of the Xbox 360. The tag team gameplay will feature prominently in the game's story mode, and it'll even be affected by each girl's attitudes toward the other competitors. For instance, two girls who are friendly with each other will perform well as a team, whereas girls who have a grudge against each other would be poor choices to use as a fighting pair.

There will also be what's being referred to as a fighting game mode, which Uchida said is essentially an homage to and an indication of the development team's respect for the Tekken series. We got a glimpse of the fighting mode in the new trailer, and it does look essentially like a fighting game, with a side-on view of the two combatants facing off against each other, and fighter-style life bars up at the top of the screen. This fighting mode will double as a tutorial for the game--it'll make it easy to introduce you to the actual wrestling mechanics. Once you've mastered the gameplay in the fighting mode, you'll be able to jump into the story mode and other ring-based gameplay types without having to worry about the learning curve.

Uchida wasn't able to get too specific about Rumble Roses XX's online features, but he did acknowledge that Xbox Live will factor prominently into the gameplay of the new sequel. For one, you'll be able to have four-player matches so that each of the four combatants in a typical tag team match is controlled by a live player. A comprehensive ranking system will be made available, which sounds like it'll fit in well with Microsoft's stat-tracking approach to online gaming. Finally, Uchida said he likes the idea of the Xbox 360's marketplace feature, and he'd like to use it to make buyable, downloadable content available for the game. He told us in a wink-nudge fashion that the team will do its best to make the sort of items available that Rumble Roses fans would want to purchase for their wrestlers (use your imagination here).

Sadly, the mud wrestling mode from the original game will be on hiatus in Rumble roses XX. In its place will be a new mode called queen's match, which Uchida wanted to keep more or less under wraps for the time being, though he said it will resemble a certain Japanese drinking game loosely translated as "king's game." He went on to say that once players got into the queen's match mode, it was likely they'd want to play the game in that mode exclusively from then on. Sounds like it could be scandalous. Rumble Roses XX is slated for release in 2006, so we'll have to wait until sometime in the future to find out exactly what the secret is.