I think the ideal thing to do would be to have people just sorta meet up in the Human Village for starters. Solving the incident isn't going to be as straightforward as 'find culprit, beat up culprit' this time, but teams will go a long way in starting that process up.

As for combat... Honestly, a mix of danmaku and actual fights is probably what I had in mind. [s]It's not like most of the cast is in a fighting game anyhow, right?[/s]

But seriously though, so long as it feels interesting and dynamic, it should be fine. I'm not going to do anything weird like relying on RNG; so long as we end up with a good story, it should be fine.