Get to know Arata and Shiina's IRL co-workers in Death end re;Quest

The 1500th Weekly Famitsu issue has new information on Compile Heart's new Galapagos RPG Death end re;Quest, which introduces real world characters that will interact with the game's protagonist Arata Mizunashi, as well as describing the battle system of the game.

Death end re;Quest revolves around the canceled VR MMORPG Worlds Odyssey, where the heroine Shiina Ninomiya is found trapped inside the game after she had gone missing for a year. Arata must fix Worlds Odyssey and help Shiina traverse through the game and eventually come back to the real world.

We have translated and compiled the information, which you can read after the jump.

Real world locations

• The real world part of Death end re;Quest will take place in Sagami City, which has developed into a gathering point for Japan's IT companies after a recent city development (which would make it the Japanese Silicon Valley). Due to the rapid expansion, you will see very generic residential blocks once you move away from the downtown. However recently, there have been repulsive town legends spreading around the city.
• Arata and Shiina work in Enigma Company, a small-scale game development company situated in Sagami City. It has not many employees, but a small number of professional staffs are gathered in each of its divisions. Enigma's main work used to be entrusted development of games, but recently it has started internal game developments after the appearance of Alice Code game engine which is made by Agur Company, a worldwide IT enterprise. This led to the planning & development of Worlds Odyssey.
• Arata and his colleagues (introduced below) will have to also find clues in the real world to help solve the mystery of Shiina's disappearance. However, they will also get to encounter more mysteries and incidents even in the real world as well. Arata can examine objects in the city to help with his investigation.

Real world characters

Famitsu shows the real world design of Shiina Ninomiya in this batch. It is also noted that Shiina had many talents that soon after she joined Enigma Company she would be appointed as the director of Worlds Odyssey. She worked hard on developing the game with Arata and other co-workers until her untimely disappearance one year ago.

A couple of new real world characters are also introduced here:

• Sumika Tokiwa: A programmer who joined Enigma Company at the same time as Arata. Although Sumika works in a different dev team from Arata, she decides to help him after finding out that Shiina, whom she has been treating like her own little sister, is trapped inside Worlds Odyssey. Sumika also has another side of being an occult mania.
• Lydia Nolan: A foreign girl who works as a character designer. She's a hardcore otaku who likes flashy costumes, and she covers a broad variety of games from common games, to games for girls and even adult games. Lydia goes along well with Shiina as they have the same age.

Battle systems in Worlds Odyssey

• Turn-based command battle
  The Worlds Odyssey game in Death end re;Quest has up to 3 main party members, which can also switch with reserve characters during battles. The battle system is turn-based command which determines action order by calculating the speed stat of each unit. As the units go through turns, they will make actions while freely moving around the field.
  The controlled character can attack by themselves, or they can also cooperate with partners or attack enemies outside their attack ranges which would allow highly strategic battles. 
  Other than the previously known Knock Bug system, where knocking enemy towards bugs will eliminate both, there is also a Knock Blow system where knocking enemy towards an ally character would cause the latter to deal extra damage to the enemy.
• Tri-Act
  This game has a unique system where a character can choose up to 3 actions within their turn. Other than basic choices like Attack, Item, and Guard, there are also an abundant variety of Skills available to choose. The same action can also be chosen more than once to amplify its effects. For example, selecting Attack-Guard-Guard in a turn would make the character guard with higher defense power than a single Guard action.
• Field Bug
  Fields in battles are being infested by Field Bugs. If these bugs touch characters, they will break and disappear, but not before they deal damage and status ailments to the characters affected. Although there are few bugs that actually give positive effects to characters, the majority of them give negative ones. On some fields that have strong bugs, it would be more strategically feasible to utilize the Knock Bug system by knocking an enemy towards the bug to eliminate both of them.
• Gridge Style
  When a character's Infection Level raises from being infected by things like Field Bugs, their parameters will gradually go awry. Once the infection reaches its limit, the character will change to their glitched Gridge Style, which for some characters would make them have more revealing attires. While on Gridge Style, the character will have cheat-level stats. However, this system is a double-edged sword, as after the time limit has passed, the character will be rendered incapacitated and unable to do actions.

Death end re;Quest will be released for PlayStation 4 in Japan. No release date or English localization has been announced yet, but we wonder if a release time frame could be announced at the upcoming Tokyo Game Show 2017. You can read the previous Famitsu coverage here.