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Touken Ranbu Warriors First Impressions
A bunch of pretty anime men and a Dynasty Warriors game walk into a bar
Until Touken Ranbu Warriors was announced, I had never heard of the series from which this crossover derives its name, license, characters, and story. However, I love Dynasty Warriors and I play every spin-off game regardless of how obscure, so I was still intrigued.
The full game launches tomorrow on the Switch and Steam platforms, and you can download a free demo right now in either place or check out the game’s site here. The demo save data carries over to the full game, and you can try out the first several missions and most of the characters. Unfortunately, the actual mission content here is quite short and more or less a glorified tutorial — you can complete the demo in about twenty minutes one time through.
However, the visuals, gameplay, and story were just strong enough to sell me on buying the full game. Basically, there’s a bunch of time monsters that jump around in history trying to mess things up, and the titular Warriors have to stop them. These warriors are all smooth beautiful anime boys and are also anthropomorphic sword people based on real weapons from throughout history. A magical fox thing that represents the time government (yes really) puts them into teams and sets them to work on various missions in an alternate reality Sengoku-period Japan.
The classic Dynasty Warriors gameplay is intact here, though slightly simplified from other recent installments. It still has a normal attack and a special “musou” attack that’s triggered by filling a meter and hitting a button. In other recent entries there’s also a heavy attack and a shoulder button menu that hides four additional attacks mapped to the face buttons. Here those systems are blended into one: pressing the shoulder button reveals four heavy attacks you can pick from, and pressing the heavy attack button just does one of these contextually without you needing to use the shortcut menu.
I checked out both the Switch and PC versions of the demo and the visuals are quite similar. This is a Switch game…
