Bungie's a style always had many points of connection with Japanese animation, even if its games have always been developed in the US. There is, though, a little bit of Japan in Destiny. It's not in the form of giant robots or giant-eyed ladies, but in something a lot more technical: the use of Criware, a middleware by the Japanese firm CRI Middleware, which released the announcement today.

CRI Middleware is the company behind glorious Dreamcast series like AeroWings and Aero Dancing, but after the era of the last of Sega's consoles they dedicated themselves fully to development of Criware, turning it into a set of tools quite popular between developers.

Destiny utilizes Criware's movie playback features, advanced codecs and encoding tech to provide cinematic cutscenes with exceptionally high quality allowing for a crisper display of fine elements like dust or narrow lines. The game also takes advantage of a feature that allows multilingual audio and subtitles while taking less disk space.

Bungie used the CRI Movie 2 feature of Criware, and according to the game's Producer the team has found the results pleasing. In addition to the standard features of the package CRI Middleare also worked directly with Bungie in order to implement additional functions in support of the Destiny's development pipeline.

Bungie is pleased to use CRI Movie in our upcoming video game Destiny. CRI Movie gives us the flexibility to ship beautiful full-motion video on several platforms without fighting compression artifacts or disc size. CRI helped us adopt the CRI Movie middleware and worked with us to make several key extensions to the tech. The CRI team in San Francisco and Japan have provided excellent technical support.