Thanks to Victor Ireland of Gaijinworks, we got a chance to sit down and play Summon Night 6. The demo we were sat in front of was a timed demo that featured a battle from the game – the fifth if I recall correctly.

Many of the main party members were already there for the fight, and the battle definitely gave me some good insight into the game’s battle system, as many things were already available.

For starters, the battle system revolves around utilizing ‘Chain Attacks’. Basically, it was all a matter of battlefield positioning, and making sure that your team could gang up on their enemies. Generally, a one-on-one attack would result in a counter attack.

That’s great news for you when your party members are hit, of course, but the reverse is not so good.The chain attack system gives you an out – when your team attacks at once, the enemy can’t counter attack.

As always, the Summon Night series retains its titular summons. While I didn’t have access to very many summons, the selection was still pretty sizable, with some characters already with four.

The summons each had different abilities available, which played into the characters’ purpose. For example, certain characters have more healing-based summons while others are more offense focused.

The game itself felt very familiar in many respects. What it does, it does really well. The combat may not have any huge gimmicks that would set it apart from others, the gameplay uses a strong core game to distinguish itself and succeeded. I definitely felt like I wanted to play more when I was done.

During the demo, there was very little in the way of visual novel parts, so I can’t say much to that end. However, the brief snippets of the translation I did see were pretty much on the mark, and I didn’t have any glaring issues that put me off immediately.

After the battle was fought, and after a cutscene, we were given the option to have a chat with one of the party members. This, of course, was to increase the relationship with the character in question, and is sure to be one of the important parts of the visual novel aspect of the game.

The scene that we saw was on the shorter side (think like 30-40 lines) but was packed with character development and standard ‘getting closer’ type conversation.

We did, however, have a brief talk with Victor Ireland regarding the voice acting and dubbing of the game. We were told that the licensing costs for the Japanese voices were simply astronomical, and the localized version will only have the English dub because of it. To put it into perspective, the cost to license the Japanese VAs would cost more than the entire revenue that Class of Heroes 2 brought in.

So far, I think that the localization version of Summon Night 6 is shaping up to be a strong game, and I’m looking forward to getting more time with it when it releases early next year.