Game #1212: Touken Ranbu Warriors

  A lot of pretty boys were harmed when playing this game. A lot.

 Touken Ranbu Warriors is yet another Warriors crossover with a pre-existing game license, much like Persona 5 Strikers or Hyrule Warriors. Touken Ranbu can be considered an Otome game, I guess, as it's a gacha game in which famous swords take the form of beautiful boys that go back in time to prevent a race of bug-things from altering history, or that's what I could gather from this game.

 Well, first things first... I didn't really care about most of the characters. There are no female characters, which I felt robbed the game of variety, albeit that's the source material's fault, and, to be honest, I didn't really like most of the character designs in this game. There's this blonde guy, who wears a hood because he is a sword based on another sword so he hides his beautiful face, and he was pretty alright since he fought with both his Katana and its sheathe, which looked cool. Oh, an the main guy, Minazuki?, the guy in blue, he was pretty cool too. The rest of the characters followed typical Japanese Shojo standards of male beauty, which I thought weren't very appealing. There are like 3-4 kid characters too, and I hated them.

 As for the narrative, as much as I like the Sengoku period, I couldn't quite get very invested in it because I didn't care about the heroes. As you play the game you can unlock small 'bond' conversations between pairs of characters, and I felt they were very silly and vapid too, so I skipped them. All of them. If you are a history buff about the Warring States period you will probably get more out of the plot, because while I know a bit about it, there are a ton of details that this game covers that eluded me.

 Gameplay is standard Warriors fare, albeit with a few new bells and whistles. As per usual, you have a basic string of attacks you can chain together by mashing the attack button, and there's a Special move button that you can press at any time during the weak attack combo to finish the combo with a special attack. There's also a super move, of course, that costs an energy bar from the Musou gauge. You battle as a team of characters on every mission, although you can't play as your chosen partner, and this game's Hyper mode, which uses a third gauge, has both your character and the one being controlled by the AI fighting together with every press of your buttons. It looks kinda neat, but it's nothing ground breaking.

 There is, however, a new mechanic, similar to what Pirate Warriors has been doing, in which holding down the R button lets you use moves assigned to the four face buttons. These attacks are the Special move enders! This way you can use them at ANY time. Don't like the Y-Y-X finisher? Press Y-Y then hold down R and use your favorite special move ender! This idea was brilliant. Another new feature, added for the ladies, is that when your character takes a strong hit... their clothes will break a bit. Pretty much everyone ends up showing their abs.

 On the other hand, the game has been streamlined a lot. Maps and skirmishes are pretty small for Warriors standards, reaching 300 kills is pretty uncommon as it is, and I think there were only one or two stages in which you could reach a 1000 kills. The thing I like about Musou games is mowing down hundreds of enemies, so I can't say I liked this. The game also has a few stupidly easy, and yet massively boring, stealth missions. Why? Who plays a Musou game to AVOID enemies? And some missions require mind-numbingly simple exploring, because if you don't and you defeat the enemy before reaching "100% analysis" you'll lose the mission. This usually means just walking towards what looks like a dead end on the mini-map to discover a hidden route. It's almost an insult to the player's intelligence. Completely unnecessary too, as this doesn't add depth to the game, only a dumb chore.

 The game's set-up is also rather weird, as the game's 18 characters are divided into 5 teams, and every "Chapter" only allows you to pick characters from that Team. To be fair, maybe if I liked the characters a bit more I would've liked how the game encouraged me to use other characters.... But I just wanted to play as my blonde pretty boy, and didn't want to play as the other derps. That said, the game is rather short, clocking in at 15 hours, which sounds like a lot, but Warriors games tend to be much, much lengthier.

 Touken Ranbu Warriors isn't bad persay, but it doesn't measure up to the other Warriors games and spin-offs. I feel as if most changes weren't very enjoyable, and the fact that I didn't like most of the playable characters did get in the way of how much I liked it.

 6.0