First revealed at a fan event a couple days back, Armored Core 5 (due out for the PS3 and Xbox 360 sometime this year) already has giant-robot fans buzzing across the Internet. Famitsu magazine sat down with series creator Toshifumi Nabeshima this week to find out what's new with this game -- and as it turns out, Nabeshima's got some pretty ambitious plans.

"I felt that with the previous game, Armored Core: For Answer, we had gone as far as we could with the 'speed' concept," Nabeshima said. "Being able to present a new kind of mech hero in For Answer was a rewarding experience, but if we kept on pursuing speed, then the gameplay would start to falter in spots -- most players simply wouldn't be able to keep up with mach-5 combat. So this time we want to retain the core aspects of what makes the series interesting -- and that includes speed -- and also present some new concepts that diverge from the past."

To be more exact, the central "theme" of Armored Core 5's battles is "violent mech action," shifting focus from speed and mobility to the brute strength of the machinery involved. "We're going for the sort of violent action that only mechs can deliver," Nabeshima said. "I want to see the sort of hero that could be born from these powerful, violent machines."

One aspect of this new approach is the Over Weapon system, powerful offense that has the capability of one-hit killing an adversary -- although actually pulling this off is very difficult. "Up to now, the battles were centered around how well you could dodge your opponent's attacks while firing away and gradually whittling down his AP," Nabeshima noted. "That's fun, of course, but once one side has an AP advantage over the other, it became difficult to come back from that. This system dramatically changes that battle balance."

Exact details on the Over Weapons will have to wait for later, but that's still just a part of what's new here. As Nabeshima puts it, the missions themselves will be far more involved than before -- "The stages are going to be a lot more complex and less flat," he said, "and there will be a great deal more detail applied to them. We want players to experience a you-are-there feel that wasn't around before." Along those lines, the scale of the mechs themselves has been reduced -- they're now an average height of 5 meters, where they were around 10 meters before -- and each mission will have multiple objects that are updated and changed depending on your current status.

From Software has pegged Armored Core 5 at only 20 percent complete, leading to theories that the game will be a late-2010 release in Japan.