As I said on my Bladestorm review, I very much enjoy Dynasty Warriors. The visceral fun of slicing down hundreds of enemies is just so enjoyable to me. I really want to find another game by Koei I can enjoy. It’s disturbing how much I love dynasty warriors, so there has to be something else Koei makes that would appeal to me. Bladestorm as it turned out, wasn’t all that great, but I haven’t given up hope because they’ve released another remastering of a game this past month.
Story
Toukiden Kiwami is set in an alternate universe, where demons, known as Oni, bring destruction and pain to a feudal looking Japan. They were banished years ago, but have resurfaced to exact their revenge on the world. You take the role of a Slayer, a man or woman with the skills and powers necessary to rid the land of the Oni. It’s up to you and your friends to save this world from being overrun by demons.
Toukiden has the classic anime scenes of collapsing maidens, and heartfelt sorrow. From an anime standpoint, the story is pretty bog standard from what I saw, and while it’s not necessarily bad, it’s about as average as they come. From a western standpoint, the story is extremely dull. And from both standpoints, it leaves a lot to be desired. Barely anything happens in the game. It drags along at pace of a glacier, because they needlessly pad the entire game to lengthen it. I’m all for games being long epics, but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to have nothing of note happen within the first 14 hours.
If you’re into anime and Japanese culture, you’ll be fine with the story. If you’re not, you’ll get bored of the cliches fairly quickly.
Gameplay
In Toukiden, you and your party run around a battlefield and slay monsters. You can create and customize your Slayer for the game, but it is a bit anemic for a creation system. You can only chose from a set number of heads and many other features aren’t there. For your character, you can choose from a wide variety of weapons with many different movesets. There’s a good selection of them, and the designs look really great. You can also upgrade them along with your armor as you earn compatibility points by using them in battles. The armor designs are good as well, but I didn’t see too many because I received a bonus armor set when I first started the game which was extremely overpowered, and made it pointless to use any other armor.
You take up missions with your AI party. Missions usually consist of either hunting down and killing a specific enemy or killing one type of enemy many times. There’s very little variety for what you can do in this game. There was one time when you were tasked to go search and find a certain herb to save someone’s life, but even that devolved into killing a specific boss enemy and then having dialogue say that you’ve coincidentally found it immediately after beating the guy. Another one was where you had to save villagers who are under attack. It would be neat seeing villagers blindly throwing haymakers at sabretooth demons, except that the villagers are all invisible, and the demons are just standing around, twiddling their thumbs until you run up to them. It’s disappointing that the variety of missions is very limited, and it would’ve been better to mix up the hunting missions more.
The combat in this game has three main buttons. Light, strong, and special. There’s no form of a juggling system in this game or a way to do awesome combos, which is a let down. Enemies don’t really react to your hits that much so a lot of the times you don’t feel like you’re doing anything when mashing on your buttons at them.
Boss battles take place against giant monsters. The designs for enemies in this game are really great, especially for the bosses. Each one is either cool looking or grotesquely awesome. The only issue you’ll run into is the length of these battles. They last an extremely long time, with barely anything happening during them. Attacking is done with three buttons, so you’ll get into the habit of mashing the same couple buttons back and forth once you find a decent combo move. Couple that with the lengthy boss battles, and after a while it gets very numbing. The bosses don’t have many different attacks, so you’ll learn their patterns quickly, attack on openings, and then continue doing that for the next 15 minutes. They also repeat the same bosses a lot of times, so you’ll know how to beat them but because they have so much life they last for far too long. The length and repetition of these battles is probably my biggest issue with this game.
When you’re not on missions you can explore the safe haven of Utakata Village. It’s a bit on the tiny side for a hub world, but it’s slightly bigger compared to Dynasty Warriors’ Ambition mode. That said, moving around the village is annoying at first because it’s snapped to this 2.5d perspective. If you try to move the camera in any direction it only zooms in. After awhile you get used to it however, so it didn’t bother me.
The original Toukiden that this is a remastering of was made for the PS Vita and you can see many limitations of the Vita still present in this PS4 game. The sectioned battlefields, the small hub location, are all there probably because the Vita doesn’t have great processing power for this game to be more expansive. I think they should’ve made more fundamental changes for this release. Toukiden Kiwami would be a lot more fun if it were open world, there was some notion of a juggling system in the game, and more variety in missions. Smacking on enemies isn’t all that fun after awhile because you don’t feel like you’re really doing anything to them until they collapse. Bosses losing their limbs doesn’t really matter when then they have an ethereal limb instantly replace it, and their animations stay the same afterwards. I’d be happier with the combat if it just didn’t take so long.
Graphics & Sound
The graphics definitely look Koei developed, in that they don’t look all that amazing. As I said, this is derived from a PS Vita game, so it doesn’t look that bad with that in mind. However it’s definitely not going to win any awards for graphics, but you’re not going to get a headache looking at this. The designs of all the UI and items are really good though. This game does have some great artwork in it.
The cutscenes look pretty good as well. All of the dialogue within cutscenes and elsewhere in the game is in Japanese so you get a big anime feel from this. I used to watch a lot of anime, so I wasn’t bothered having to read subtitles every time someone spoke.
The music isn’t much to note. Thinking off the top of my head I can’t remember any songs that stand out, either for being bad or being good.
If you don’t mind 2010 graphics and having to read subtitles, you’ll be fine with what this game has to offer.
Conclusion
I had fun for awhile while playing Toukiden Kiwami. I enjoy the weapon design and selection, the monster design, and running around killing things. However, my patience wore thin as the hobbling pace of the game made me keep repeating battlefields and boss battles, which then were stretched to grueling lengths with the bosses having the same attack patterns and me mashing the same buttons over and over. Toukiden Kiwami suffers heavily from being an extremely padded game, and feels much like an anime with a ton of filler. If you can get past the annoyingly long and grinding boss battles, and are fine with simple controls, you’ll find Toukiden Kiwami to be fun and have lasting appeal. I personally couldn’t stick around long enough to finish the game.
