Hajime Kimura, the art director for Nintendo's brand new upcoming IP Astral Chain, talks about the art direction in a new post from the official dev blog. Kimura talks about the progression of the art designs of the Legions, as well as the involvement of character designer Masakazu Katsura, the artist behind beloved manga like Tiger & Bunny and Zetman.

Katsura also designed the Sword Legion (SV-05), the first Legion introduced in the game (top left). And continuing clockwise from the middle left is Axe Legion (SV-01), Arm Legion (SV-02), Beast Legion (SV-03), and Arrow Legion (SV-04):

Before Katsura came on, the art director had previously brainstormed designs for the Legion. According to the blog:

...in the earliest stages of development, there wasn’t anything called a "Legion" at all. Your "partners" were simply enemy chimeras that you captured throughout the game. They might look something like you see here. But then we decided that the main characters needed actual, established partners to seem like part of a heroic police team. Thus the Legions were born.

As they went along in the designing phase, they started to experiment with tokusatsu aesthetics like from Kamen Rider. And once Katsura gave the director his own design, they began to incorporate the details and parts he put in into their own non-humanoid Legions (as shown in the last picture above).

And here's a full shot of all the finalized Legions:

We also get a sneak peak at some of the concept artwork from the limited edition set's artbook, including of NPC Captain Maximilian Howard:

The most important question on anyone's mind, however, is whether you can pet Beast Legion. And the answer is yes!:

The previous dev blog, starring the lead composer, went into the sound and music design of the game. It also features some sample tracks from the game. And in a recent set of tweets from game director, he reveals the influence Pokemon had on Astral Chain. As well as the affect science fiction anime and Japanese police procedurals have had an inspiration on the story.

Astral Chain‘s protagonists are part of a police force named Neuron. This means that not only must players deal with Chimera-related incidents, but you also need to do police work.  The protagonist can control five different Legion with each one having their own specifications. There’s also a beginners’ mode and activating this mode allows players to automatize various actions, making gameplay much easier.

Astral Chain isn’t the first part of a trilogy unlike what was recently reported, as that turned out be an error on IGN’s part. There’s the full trailer, which touches on some of the RPG and explorations features, and a reveal of the game’s box art and size. Astral Chain launches exclusively for Nintendo Switch on August 30th and you can still preorder it right now on Amazon.