All Grounds: Initial D Arcade Stage 7 AA X ( D7AAX )

Hachiroku. The first thing I came up with if you ask me about hachiroku is Initial D. Well, Initial D was well-known because of the famous Akina's Downhiller driving a Panda Hachiroku. Well this time I've some information from my personal blog ( http://nachan96.wordpress.com/ ) about Initial D Arcade Stage 7 AA X.

Helo guys, I’ve been waiting for months for this issue to come out, and around days ago the Japanese Initial D players have tasted the new game, yes D7AAX ( it’s kinda random to put X behind the title though lol )

As you can see on the location test appearance, the game interface is good. Not for when you selected the menus or courses. But when you race against other players or time attacking some courses.

For the interface of the game, I’ll start with the menu selection appearance.

Menu Selection photo :

It’s quite bad, don’t you think? It looks like more like a Animal Kaiser kind of games. I mean the appearance. Not totally bad though, but it still makes me feel some kinda strange whenever I looked at that. But if you look at it closely there’re somethings that not bad, like the time when you are picking menus, and the connection bar,etc. and also the driver’s name and photo has been made bigger, and it’s that thing that not going so bad here.

After finishing a Time Attack :

WHY IT HAS TO BE A “X” ??? It was my first question when I looked at this photo. The red X is so bad that I want to break my monitor. And the headings of this scene it’s bad too. I mean, green + red? It’s not Christmas yet ! For this scene I think that’s all that I want to change, because the overall of this scene is quite good, I mean, compared to the Menu Selection one. Ah, the headings, it seems that it counts how many time attacks we have done? Maybe, I haven’t play it yet, so……

When you’re Racing scene :

This is the one and only interface that looked kinda cool to me. Although the Time Attack is not so bad, but this interface is looking sooo good…… I mean, there’re somethings that have been changed, that’s the Driver’s datas, and the Meters. The Driver’s datas is looking cool, and the “your time” and “street time” on time attack mode is good. And that reaction to the Driver’s background is something that I think is looking cool. It changed I think whenever we’re in front or behind our opponent. Or even when we passed Checkpoints on Time Attack mode. The other one is Meters. It seems that SEGA has put more into the meters, so we now have Brake, Acceleration meters on our own. So we can observes other players without really looking at their footwork. It will be so useful for the amateurs or even the pros. And the other meter is Tire Meter, I think, IDW (Initial D World) members were also think it was the Tire Meter, so maybe this game will mix D6AA, D5, and D3 to it’s gameplay (I will explain later). But, my friend think about the Unknown Meter (which i called tire meter earlier) is the Timer for each game. But still we don’t know the truth about this Unknown Meter.

Other Scenes :

This is another scene that I’ve been looking at. I think this is the Story Mode where you can/have to (?) tag with your partners to get this thing done. So you have to defeat the tag rivals so you can, go to the next battle. I think this story mode will be hard to beat, I mean not every friend of yours was a truly D players and they’ve got time of their own. And your friend is not always bring much money to the Arcade just to play this game.

This is another scene that has been posted by SEGA on the Initial D NET. I think this scene is about the meter of Downhill and Uphill that we’ve been cleared on Tag Story Mode? I hasn’t known the details either. I will look it up and share with you guys, though. And the Driver is given the “DH” and “UH” sign (?) for differentiate who is the downhill and uphill driver (?)

Gameplay :

The gameplay itself didn’t changed to much. It was only somethings have been changed a bit. When you’re racing you have to watch the Tire Meter, so you need extra focus on those. And it seems SEGA has gave us Boost Bank (?) that will saving our boost, so we can use the boost at a serious time, when we need it (?) The other one is the car’s speed, when running through the corners, when you’re running through a mid-sharp corners it seems that the speed will not drop one a bit, and will continue accelerating at almost the exit corner, if you’re not stop pressing the gas pedal. It was more like D3 to me, that we could gained extra speed if we’re not letting the gas pedal off when running through the corners.

The other thing is the drift lights, is still on there. But it changed it’s position into the speedometer itself. The speed for every courses have been decreased if I call it correctly. Example: Akina’s Max Speed is now around 155kmh, as we knew before 170kmh. and Tsukuba’s max speed before is around 195-200kmh, now it has around 170kmh (?) This decreasing causing the Time goes slower than we did in D6AA. And the lighting area when you choose ‘Night’ instead of ‘Day’, is being darken (?)

Another one that I barely recognized is the way you control your steering wheel. It seems that it has been changed, it seems that you’ve to barely keeping the steering wheel turned when facing the corners, and counter the wheel when you have ‘really’ faced the exit corner. So basically, this game will be having much more ‘understeer’ than D6AA has. I don’t know the detail much, but it seems that D6AA gameplay the ‘brake~(quickly)~gas’ is still on and still used by those who have been playing the location test.

And another course has been unlocked, yeah, the famous course from D3, Tsuchisaka is finally BACK !! But, still I want more rather than just a ‘tsuchisaka’. But if Tsuchisaka is back, so there’re some chances that the Evo brothers (Evo 5,6) will be back. So we could driver more Evos lol. The oil from “Keisuke’s incident” is still there btw.

For the card I don’t know much, it seems we can transfered our card just like D5 2.0 EXP to D6AA. It just my thought, though. Here’s
the picture of Winner’s Card. (damn, he has played it!) It looks a lot more like D4 IC Cards lol. I mean their colors. And this is the photo how the speedometers look now.