El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron creator Sawaki Takeyasu is working on a new game called The Lost Child and it has some SMT-like demon-befriending features. Here’s the latest on that from Kadokawa Games. [Thanks, Game Jouhou.]

As previously reported, the protagonist Hayato Ibuki will go up against brutal creatures known as the “Astral Bodies” or “Astrals” that come in various forms such as the Shoggoth, Deep Ones, Old Ones, and more.

As the magazine-writer Hayato check out different parts of Tokyo, he’ll take on these Astrals in dungeons, and will also get to befriend them.

Astrals come in three categories of Angels, Demons, and Fallen Angels. They can also be powered up. Here’s more on how they can be powered up:

There’s a constant probability of your participating Astrals to learn new skills in battle.

You can level up Astrals by infusing them with Karma that is acquired in battle. Karma comes in three colors of red (Demons), blue (Angels), and purple (Fallen Angels) and you’ll need to use the right colors in order to level up the corresponding Astrals.

Astrals that reach max level can evolve into their next forms.

The next part is about transferring skills:

Skills that are learned during combat can be traded with skills of other Astrals.

However, keep in mind that skills that you trade between Astrals but be of same value in order to pull it off.

The next part is about “Reformatting” Astrals:

You can make an Astral’s level go back to 1.

By doing so, your Astral’s starting stats will be much higher than it originally was at level 1, allowing you to further increase its potential.

You can basically get any weak Astral and use the Reformat feature and skill transfers to eventually make it into a strong one.

And finally, the last bit is about the endless dungeons that await after completing the main story:

The Lost Child offers a beefy “infinite dungeons” feature after completing the main story.

There are infinite dungeons (you can actually see all the maps in the above image’s background) prepared for this mode, and the further you go the tougher the enemies you’ll find.

By using the enhancement systems, the objective is to take on these dungeons using your very own party of powered-up Astrals.

During the test-play sessions, the developers spent over 300 hours playing the post-game dungeons content alone.

The Lost Child releases in Japan on August 24, 2017 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.