At a recent event in London, director Hiroyuki Kaneko and producer Koji Nakajima were present to showcase the upcoming One Piece fighter, One Piece: Burning Blood. They began by quickly running through some of the already announced features for Burning Blood, highlighting the 3×3 battles and Devil Fruit / Haki abilities. They announced One Piece was coming to more fans than ever before, releasing on the Xbox One in addition to PC, PS4 and PS Vita. In addition to this, the game will feature Polish and Russian language options in addition to English, French, Italian, German and Spanish options.

One of the new announcements is the introduction of support characters into the game, including Mozu and Kiwi as a pair and Bepo. As well as selecting your team of three playable characters, you can also select three support characters. The characters don’t appear in the game but give you additional effects such as restoring part of your HP or making your attacks a little stronger. Depending on what the effect is, you use support characters via the d-pad or come about via certain battle conditions. The purpose of the support characters is to help you amplify your team’s strengths or to help cover some of it’s weaknesses.

After going through what One Piece: Burning Blood has to offer, we were shown a cutscene from the Paramount War mode, which is essentially Burning Blood’s story mode. Paramount War will cover the Marineford arc of One Piece, offering four different characters to play as, each with their own story. You’ll be able to play as Ace, Whitebeard, Akainu and of course, Luffy. The cutscene featured Ace and Blackbeard which led into a battle between the two, though neither Nakajima or Kaneko were able to defeat Blackbeard! While I’m not familiar enough with One Piece to recognize the scene, visually Burning Blood looks extremely faithful to the unique designs of the series, capturing all the quirks.

We’ll have a hands-on with the game available soon as well as an interview with Nakajima and Kaneko.

One Piece: Burning Blood will be available on 3rd June 2016 on PC, Xbox One, PS4 and PS Vita and June 2016 on PC.