Touken Ranbu Warriors

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Swords! Who doesn’t love ’em? They’re sharp! They’re deadly! You can fillet your foes or slice up apples with them! The one problem with swords is that you can’t have deep romantic relationships with them…or can you?! Yes, Touken Ranbu Warriors is here and it’s going to make your dreams of amorous armaments come true.

via YouTube

If you’re not familiar with Touken Ranbu, it’s the equivalent of something like Azur Lane or Kantai Collection – you’ve got a bunch of objects given anthropomorphic form, then a game’s been put together to give you reasons to pull for them on a gachapon system. In this case, it’s swords! Swords that become beautiful, beautiful boys! Find your dreamy favorite and fall in love with them! This is the kind of thing that’d really only appeal to a particular audience, but boy, does that audience love it.

While the mobile game’s a sort of autobattler/tower-defense deal, Touken Ranbu Warriors is a more traditional Musou-style game where you control a pair of sword boys of your choice, leading them to victory against the History Retrograde Army. As their name might suggest, these baddies seek to change the past by making adjustments to key events, such as historic battles; the fact that the HRA tends to summon Zerg-looking aliens to help them do this might be enough of a change to history in itself, but that mostly doesn’t come up. You and your sexy, sexy minions are here to stop the HRA’s schemes, ensuring that history remains nice and historical.

You’ll do this via Musou-style combat! Mash buttons, use special attacks, team your boys up for a power boost, it’s the stuff you’ve come to know and love from this series. Sometimes you’ll also have to explore around a bit and talk to NPCs to ensure you’re properly correcting history, but the meat of this game involves killing hordes of HRA goons. You can also upgrade your gear by having your bladed boy band dig up materials between missions, as well as having them level up, gain skills and chat amongst themselves to build bonds.

That’s pretty much it, but if you’re a long-running Touken Ranbu fan it just might be all you need. In particular, if your favorite sword guy is available here, it’s an insta-buy without question since he’s bound to have plenty of adorable interactions that will melt you into a sword-puddle. Meanwhile, if you’re not familiar with the series then Touken Ranbu Warriors is less of an immediate recommendation, though Musou fans just might have a good time with this one if they can catch it on sale.