The way of the Warriors.
At first blush, Koei Tecmo’s Touken Ranbu Warriors appears to be something of a “My First Dynasty Warriors“, or a “Diet” Musou. It’s based on DMM’s (popular in Japan) free-to-play browser-based collectable card game, targeted at Japanese women — specifically a subculture of otaku known as “katana women” – ladies who like to pose with historical Japanese swords. Ironically, this trend more or less began with Capcom’s frankly superior Dynasty Warriors clone, Sengoku Basara, which became wildly popular and span off into all manner of media, becoming something of a cultural phenomenon on its home turf. Now Koei Tecmo, via developer Omega Force and co-developer Ruby Party, have carved out a niche of a niche of its own. So what’s the end result like?
For a game based more or less on a formula established over 20 years ago, Touken Ranbu Warriors – in terms of core gameplay – is nothing new to Musou veterans. It’s an almost excessively lax variation on the template, though, in which the actual ‘Easy Mode’ offers almost no resistance at all. It feels less like wading into a battlefield teeming with bloodthirsty enemies and more like sweeping an endless succession of floors littered with trash. If you let your character – out of a variety of 15 playable characters – stand around on the battlefield, only very occasionally will an enemy step up to poke you before quickly returning to its original position. If it wasn’t for the odd time limit, there would be almost no pressure to compete at all.
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