Each week Japanese gaming bible reviews the latest new releases across all formats and most of the time they go by without more than a mere glance. However, this week one of the most anticipated role-playing games on the Nintendo DS has been rated, the Mistwalker project ‘A.S.H. - Archaic Sealed Heat’.

The way Famitsu works is that four reviewers do a small summary of the game and provide their own score out of ten, but for the sake of clarity, these scores have been added together and a total out of forty has been provided below instead. Due to A.S.H being the main focus (it hits Japan on 4th October), below are some translated details from the actual review (courtesy of neo2046 of the NeoGAF.com forums):

“The ASH review basically says that the game is founded on team formation tactics, the characters are tiny on the map, but touch controls are rather smooth. The interface is fine for actually playing and controlling, but they seem to have issues with certain issues like like when you are forming your party. They also mention that the battles take really long and hence finishing each map takes ages.”

And here are all the actual review scores for the games featured in this latest issue:

• A.S.H. - Archaic Sealed Heat (NDS, Mistwalker) - 9 / 8 / 8 / 8: (33/40)
• Dragon Ball Z: Sparking Meteor (Wii, Bandai Namco) - 9 / 8 / 8 / 8: (33/40)
• Dragon Ball Z: Sparking Meteor (PS2, Bandai Namco) - 8 / 8 / 8 / 8: (32/40)
• Gundam Battle Chronicle (PSP, Bandai Namco) - 8 / 8 / 8 / 8: (32/40)
• Jikkyou Powerful Major League 2 (PS2/Wii, Konami) - 8 / 8 / 7 / 7: (30/40)
• Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula: Road to the Infinity 4 (PSP, Sunrise) - 5 / 5 / 5 / 5: (20/40)

Stick around for further updates throughout the day here on Nintendic…