Hmm I'm not exactly sure myself! Just alil silly worrying earlier in the thread what with the worldwide annoucement an all.
Yeah, I was playing with the idea myself. I mean it's a concept that we all sort of vaguely understand but don't know specifically what it means. It's obviously happened before (changing of Nintendo boxarts with Kirby etc., changing of Gunvolt's design) but what it may mean in this situation is an interesting idea
I figured by now the revealed screenshots established Vergil is Dante's teammate.
I wouldn't be too surprised if some newer character to the series meets Dante and claims to have expected someone with darker hair or something, or some comment about a supposed half-angel ancestry.
The Resident Evil and Yakuza characters are "grounded", male and badass enough to meet standards/stereotypes of modern western games - maybe that's part of the reason to reveal them first, as PXZ's western success appears to have been a surprise, considering how unlikely its localization seemed at one point. So the game's being promoted based on what Japan thinks western players might like?
I still hope they manage to sneak in more classic and comparatively whimsical characters like Valkyrie and Arthur - NxC was great about covering and blending together many different character and setting tones, PXZ less so, but still compromised well... I hope that charm won't be lost.
For Namco, technically KOS-MOS and T-elos are gynoids.... still, I'm curious to see the gender ratio on the following reveals.
I'm practically expecting Ryu to team up with a female character (in part to make up for some of the other team changes) - it got kinda boring to see him next to the identically-dressed Ken all the time.
In normal circumstances Dante and Dimitri, as well as KOS-MOS and T-elos, would have been at each other's throats - I'm looking forward to the explanation the game comes up with.
In NxC, Kazuya was always in devil form (actually, a devil perosnality was overriding his own there), and he spent some time trapped at by the Ghosts'n Goblins and Tower of Druaga villains - he might have a score to settle, and red arremers are classic infernal fodder in these games...
The asset reuse now does make me wonder if former teammates of character who changed teams will now get to be assist units - or/and if solo units will work differently.
In PXZ's engine there was functionally no reason for regular units to be paired, other than to make attacks look cooler (and you assigned them equipment as if they were a single character too...), so older once-paired units would now have the same amount of commands to work with in the battle screens...
Yeah I was joking about implying you were asking for a double Dante team, but I understand my tone came across as ambiguous.
Re: Kos-mos and t-elos, technically you're right but they're clearly made in the image of certain genders (hence, gynoid) and are often referred to with gendered pronouns as far as I'm aware. Keep in mind I haven't played any Xenosaga games but it's just loose stuff I've seen from fans.
wasn't Kos-mos supposed to be some sort of analogue to Mary Magdalene?
As for Ryu, within the mythos of Street Fighter I think Ken is the obvious pick, and the only other one I can think of is...Sakura? Chun-Li? But Chun-Li and Ryu don't strike me as all that tight, they just know of each other. I agree that there's a decent chance that Ken gets replaced though.
thanks for all of your other comments though, esp the comment on Kazuya's history in NxC. I definitely agree with the last point, on a conceptual level. There's no "essence" that separates a solo unit/pair unit except for the gameplay limits that they were given.