Phoenix Wright’s “daughter” Trucy and childhood friend/rival Miles Edgeworth are coming back for Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies, the fifth mainline entry in the series.

Both characters’ were revealed, along with their new looks, in the latest issue of Famitsu. Trucy doesn’t appear to have changed much since her appearance in Ace Attorney 4. Edgeworth, on the other hand, shows his age by sporting a new, longer coat and a pair of glasses.

Capcom also put out a new trailer for the game, but it focuses more on Phoenix and the new prosecutor Jin Yūgami.

Source: Court Records [via Japanator]

Atlus is working on Etrian Odyssey: Millennium Girl, a 3DS remake the first Etrian Odyssey. According to the latest issue of Famitsu, the game will place a bigger emphasis on story rather than party customization.

Instead of creating your own characters, you will take control of a main character and follow a scripted storyline based on the original game. The game starts with your character, a young man working for a guild in Etria, bumping into a mysterious, gun-toting girl with amnesia.

As you continue playing, additional party members will join up with you. However, unlike the original game, you won’t be able to choose their classes.

Millennium Girl will feature voiced story segments, and so far, Kousuke Toriumi, Daisuke Ono, Toshiyuki Toyonaga, Mariya Ise and Shizuka Ito are confirmed to lend their voices to the project.

The game launches on June 27 in Japan for ¥6279 (≈$66).

Source: NeoGAF (via Cubed3)

A 40 out of 40 from Famitsu may not be seen as prestigious as it was back when the publication barely awarded one a year, but it’s still quite an achievement when any game receives high marks in their reviews.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf didn’t quite have enough to get a perfect score, but it came close. Three of the four reviewers gave the 3DS sim a 10 out of 10, while the fourth gave a 9 out of 10.

Other noteworthy 39 out of 40 games are: Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Mario 64, Resident Evil (GC) and Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. If the quality of those games are any indication of what we can expect from Animal Crossing: New Leaf, it’s fair to assume that we’re going to be in for a treat.

New Leaf comes out next week in Japan and sometime early next year for North America.

Source: Vooks

Kirby’s Dream Collection: Special Edition won’t just be a compilation of Kirby games from the past two decades. The latest Weekly Famitsu revealed that Nintendo is adding a couple of extra features.

The first is a mode called “More Challenge Stage,” which was influenced by the challenges in Kirby’s Return to Dreamland. Here, players are limited to only one type of ability (e.g. Sword Challenge and Fighter Death Match). There are more than 10 More Challenge Stage levels.

The other mode is an in-game “Kirby History” calendar that highlights noteable dates in the franchise’s past, including stuff regarding the manga and anime series.

Source: Andriasang

The character you create in Fire Emblem: Awakening can’t remember anything because, you see, they have… AMNESIA!

Yes, the cliche that’s been beaten to death so much that it could also be considered a cliche to beat it to death is showing up in Awakening.

Despite your character’s inability to remember things, they somehow know the protagonist Krom’s name and have some knowledge of field tactics, which prompts Krom and his sister Rizu to let you tag along as part of their vigilante force. Apparently, the qualifications to become a vigilante are pretty lax.

On the gameplay side of things, Famitsu had plenty of new details to share:

• Support Units: Engaging in a battle while adjacent to an ally will trigger a support effect which boosts your unit’s abilities. The ally will appear in the battle and act as a Support unit, capable of using Dual Attacks and Dual Guards.
• Three difficulty settings: Normal, Hard and Lunatic
• Play Styles: In addition selecting difficulty, players can choose from Casual and Normal play styles. Playing in Causal mode turns off permadeath and enables saving anywhere.
• Navigable World Map: Like Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, players will be able to travel along a world map and buy items, take part in skirmishes and go back to previously-visited locales.

Source: Andriasang

Famitsu posted a bunch of new screenshots to showing off the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pinocchio stages that will be appearing in Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance.

In addition to the two worlds, Famitsu.com also has screens of Sora and Riku taking on swarms of Dream Eaters, the colorful foes you’ll encounter in KH3D:DDD.

A 40 out of 40 from Famitsu is not an easy task. With its four-person review panel, the Japanese publication doesn’t come across many games that garner four 10s. In fact, there have only been 15 perfect scores in the magazine’s 25 year history. Well, make that 16.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword became the latest game to receive a 40 out of 40 from Famitsu, making it the third game in the series to earn a perfect score from the publication (the last one being The Wind Waker).

Plenty of extremely positive reviews (and a 7.5) have been coming in, but we’ll have to wait until Sunday before we can find out if Skyward Sword actually lives up to the hype.

Source: PCWorld

The folks at Marvelous are looking to add more to the Rune Factory formula for the series’ 3DS debut and the latest issue of Famitsu has a breakdown of some of the new things you can expect to see in Rune Factory 4.

The biggest change you’ll notice will be in the way courtship works. Instead of jumping from being friends to being married, Rune Factory 4 introduces a sort of dating period where you can be more a bit more intimate with someone, but not fully committed. During this period, you can still flirt with other potential partners.

Rune Factory 4 takes a cue from the Wii and PS3′s Tides of Destiny and lets you play as either a guy Lest or a girl Frey. No matter your decision, both characters will start the game with no recollection of their past (a seemingly reoccurring trope in the Rune Factory universe).

Since you can now play as a male or female, it means that there will be both male and female suitors as well. So far only two possible lovers have been revealed: Margarete, a elf girl who plays music at the dining hall and Vishnal, a guy training to be a butler.

The farming and dungeon-crawling elements made the Rune Factory series so addicting will, once again, return for Rune Factory 4.

Development on the game is about halfway done and it should be out in Japan sometime later this year.

Source: andriasang

Masahiro Sakurai has decided that his company, Project Sora, will dedicate all their efforts to completing Kid Icarus: Uprising before moving on to work on the 3DS and Wii U versions of Super Smash Bros.

Sakurai made this announcement a while back in his interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, but he restated it in his regular column in the Japanese publication Famitsu and elaborated on the current development situation:

“We’ve got two new games out in the open when there’s no extra time to work with them at all. It makes me cringe, and I’m not sure it’s the smartest thing to make gamers wait for several years, but the early announcement was made chiefly in order to attract new team members.”

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect Super Smash Bros. to miss the Wii U launch window and I wouldn’t hold my breath on seeing the 3DS version in 2012.

Source: 1UP

In a huge feature in the latest issue of Famitsu, head of the 3DS hardware team Hideki Konno revealed that the 3DS main feature, 3D gaming, wasn’t a part of the original plans for the DS’ successor.

From andriasang:

Famitsu asked Konno what he kept in mind when creating the followup to the system that serves as Nintendo’s representative platform, the DS. The initial target that was in place for creating the DS successor was to make a new system that was backwards compatible. This meant that certain design choices had to be kept in place — things like having two screens and the bottom screen being a touch panel. Because of this, Konno placed his focus on features that were added later, including 3D.

It wasn’t until after Konno joined the hardware team back in 2008 that Nintendo tried revisiting 3D effects (They had experimented before with the Game Boy Advance SP and GameCube). As part of some early tests, the hardware development team tried out some 3D displays with the Wii. Needless to say, they liked what they saw.

Source: andriasang