Sony have released a new trailer for Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy, which you can watch above. The description of the game included with the video reads as follows:

Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy is a sci-fi dungeon crawling RPG that takes place in near-future Tokyo. With the city under the constant threat of Variants—genetically engineered monsters—and the emergence of portals leading a mysterious dimension called the Abyss, the government has established a secret organization called the Code Physics Agency to investigate these mysterious phenomena. Operating under the guise of a private school called Hinowa Academy, the CPA recruits teenage youths to be part of the “Xion Transhuman (Xth) Squad”. The CPA uses their Code technology to provide the Xth Squad with “Blood Codes”, special Codes that contain the genomes of history’s greatest heroes and bestow the Xth Squad with powerful abilities to combat the Variant menace. Using a team of six people, the player will map dungeons, evade traps, and face powerful monsters as they investigate the mystery behind the Variants and the Abyss.

NIS America also recently demoed the game for about an hour. You can check out the live stream here. It gave us a peek at the game’s systems, its cast, dungeoning and battles.

Characters

The stream introduced us to Alice Mifune, the captain of the Xth squad; Kenichi Kanzaki, the dean of Hinowa Academy; Kaito Saeki, the vice-captain of the Xth Squad; Mac Goto of the Physics Agency; Yusaka Fuwa, a detective with the XPD (the fake, public face of the CPA); and Johnny Sakuraba, a student at the academy who wants to be a comedian.

Hub and environments

Hinowa Academy, as the Xth Squad’s headquarters, is the hub of the game, to which players return between missions. It contains a Development Lab, where equipment is developed for the squads to use; items are restricted according to type, Blood Code, and level. There’s a Medical Lab, where players can Rest in order to level up, and heal their party members. Players can also recruit (i.e. create) new party members here, which involves choosing from various base avatars, tweaking their appearance, and fiddling with the newly created character’s stats. And there’s an option to partake in therapy; how that figures into the game is unclear.

Apart from Hinowa Academy, we get a look at two other locations, Gakuto Sewer (apparently the school names its sewers), and Morimoto High-rise, where players will have their first battle as part of a training exercise.

Dungeoning

Players can’t save scum in the abyss (dungeons). Instead, a limited number of consumable “Power Recorders” are provided; using one lets the player save once. The item screen in-game, through which players boost, use, and equip items, is called the “sub-disk”.

Of the variants in the game, we get a look at the Hobgoblin, Urban Terrors, Vorpal Rabbits, and one (pictured above) referred to only as a “Mysterious Variant”,  which vomits smaller variants. The longer that players linger in a specific dungeon, the more chance they have to encounter more powerful variants.

Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy will launch on the PS Vita in North America on April 14, and in Europe on April 17. The limited edition of the game is already available for pre-order.