This year, Final Weapon had the chance to go and cover the Japanese Arcade and Amusement Expo in Chiba, Japan to see all of the newest arcade games being released onto the market in 2020 and beyond.
As with every year at JAEPO, most of the news comes from 4 or 5 major companies. This article will be covering news from Konami’s booth at JAEPO.
To start off with, Konami announced a brand new arcade title at JAEPO this year called Armored Princess: Battle Conductor. The game is a third person battle royale style action game where the player controls their own Armored Princess, a 15cm tall sentient robot.
Probably the most obvious unique inclusion with this particular machine is the special holographic LCD which the player uses to communicate with their Armored Princess. Support for Konami’s “Card Connect” printing machine is also planned in the future. Currently the release date is To Be Determined
The other big news at JAEPO this year for Konami was the introduction of redesigned and reworked cabinets for two of their rhythm game franchises; Jubeat and Pop’n Music.
Starting with Jubeat, the new cabinet features a 1.2 time larger screen than the older model, the cube on the top is now on an angle and the whole cabinet is decked out with lights. When playing it for myself I did personally notice an improvement in the buttons as well as the fact that the game seemed to be running at 60FPS, an improvement over the 30FPS that Jubeat has seemingly been running at up until now.
Meanwhile, the new Pop’n Music cabinet has seen a drastic overhaul from previous iterations. “New Pop’n Music: Welcome to Wonderland!” adds in two new note types, both of which are designed to be hit with the new touch slider located below the 9 colourful gameplay buttons. Said gameplay buttons are now also quite a bit smaller than on previous cabinets and are placed closer together so there’s a lot less slapping involved overall.
New Pop’n also adds in a QR code reader which lets you scan in QR codes to load in a character, with collectable cards plus acrylic figures replacing the traditional character selection system. The machine does have a few oddities, namely what seems to be a camera covered up by duct tape on the top portion of the machine but these are most likely for features that were not present in the JAEPO build of the game.
The release dates for both the new Jubeat and new Pop’n machines and the games on them are currently to be determined at time of writing.
That just about covers all the major announcements for Konami’s booth this year at JAEPO. Stay tuned to Final Weapon for more JAEPO coverage.
