July 20^th, 2005 (7:02pm) - Earlier today we reported that Dead or Alive 4 would be a launch title for the Xbox 360 in Japan. Additionally, in that same issue of Famitsu, some new details regarding DOA4 were revealed by Team Ninja’s Tomonobu Itagaki.

Itagaki has revealed that there will be over twenty characters included in Dead or Alive 4, with eight of these characters created by Itagaki himself and that he created the game’s story as well. The game’s storyline was made up two years ago, however, development on the game didn’t start until a year ago. There was a time when Dead or Alive 4 had been in development alongside Dead or Alive Ultimate.

A new feature to the series is a "slow shutter effect" that will be used to blur certain moves. According to Itagaki, some of the moves the game’s characters will pull off are too fast to be captured appropriately at sixty frames per second. This effect was not shown during any of the E3 demonstrations. Additionally, Team Ninja is thinking of included a cameraman mode to capture images of the game’s bouts and will show this blur effect in action.

This next little detail isn’t a little detail at all. Some big changes will happening to the DOA franchise with this Xbox 360 instalment and this one has much to do with how the gam plays... Itagaki has revealed that major changes have been made to the fighting movies of all previous characters. Many moves have been replaced in order to balance things out further and to give the game a slightly different feel over past DOA games.

We hope to have more on DOA4 from Microsoft’s Tokyo Games Summit next week.