Toukiden: The Age of Demons – Game Review

The Omega Force development team at Tecmo Koei have for many years now brought us video games under the “Warriors” heading, from Dynasty Warriors which is set to receive its first PlayStation 4 iteration later this year, Samurai Warriors and a number of other side-games such as the upcoming Zelda Musou which are mostly button-mashing action / hack and slash games differing in their location and setting. While certain elements are shared between them, I have in the past found them satisfying to play through.

While retaining the same style of gameplay as previous works, Toukiden: The Age of Demons is a completely new IP for the company that as others have pointed out, is similar in style to the Monster Hunter franchise. But the question remains… does this Dynasty Warriors x Monster Hunter hybrid offer anything enjoyable for the PlayStation Vita which so desperately requires games on its platform? Fortunately while it may not be perfect, this still makes for a solid playthrough.

Storyline

Your silent custom-created character has recently been enlisted as part of the Slayers, a group of individuals who protect Nakatsu Kuni from the onslaught of Oni (Demons) that appeared in the human world eight years before the events of the game begin. While the slayers managed to successfully make a stand against the demons in what is now known as “The Awakening”, the battle against the Oni still continues, with the manpower in the village of Utakata Village dwindling. As a new recruit to the group, you (or any figment of imagination) begin to work as a Slayer,with it soon becoming clear that he / she has a much greater potential.

The core storyline in itself is quite interesting and is fairly well handled if you are looking for an experience centred exclusively around the threat that the Oni pose to Nakatsu Kuni. However for a game that has quite a few side-missions available to the player, I was hoping to see more development of other “party” members instead of just being trivial quests. While it can become cumbersome to listen to after the first hour or two of any play session, it still was an average storyline being told, starting off better than it ended.

Design / Music / Voice Acting

While the environment designs are uninspiring, bland and often overused for missions, the character designs are something that I must applaud. Each of the NPC character models featured a good degree of detail in addition to some rather nice character portrait artwork (Pictured above) that would put the designs in-line with the quality of Omega Force’s recent releases on the PlayStation 3.

As I believe has been mentioned a couple of times on this site in the past few years, I love character creation opportunities in video games, and was pleased to see that Omega Force opted to have the main character as fully customizable by the player. While the customization opportunities are not as expansive as the ones present in Dynasty Warriors 7 Empires, they still offered a decent degree of control in what your player character looks like, complemented by a variety of attire options dictated by the equipment the character wears. 

The music options in Toukiden: The Age of Demons were the usual Omega Force affair, a nice selection of tracks that suit the setting and intensity of the scene taking place, and complement all the other elements of the game well. In terms of voice acting, Tecmo Koei opted not to provide an English dub and instead retain the original Japanese dub with English subtitles, which given the Japanese setting was a justified localization decision. While it may not appeal to some audiences who are more inclined to having the dual-language or English exclusive options, the Japanese voice cast provided suitable roles for each of their respective characters.

Gameplay

Those familiar with Omega Force games should be able to grasp the “hack and slash” gameplay mechanics of Toukiden: The Age of Demons relatively quickly, however there are a number of new gameplay mechanics present which have not yet been explored in any of their previous titles. During battles you join up to three other NPC or online player characters on the field, and undertake missions ranging from the tedious to the challenging. Most of the time you will be facing against generic Oni which can be taken out using the “button mashing” system of gameplay – with three attack buttons and an evade button at your disposal.

Rather than limiting you to one style of weapon, Toukiden: The Age of Demons provides an optimized set of six weapon classes which offer slightly different attack strategies and can provide some additional benefit or challenge when facing off against boss monsters. While you have your standard set of weapons such as the sword, dual-knives and gauntlets, I can’t help but enthuse about the “Chain and Sickle” class which is more distinct than any of the others, including the option to throw the flail and jump on top of an enemy, beneficial as there is no jump button included in this game. The player is not locked to any one weapon class, and all weapons can be upgraded using the forge.

To further diversify the player character, throughout Toukiden you can obtain over two hundred different Mitama, the souls of fallen heroes which can be equipped on a weapon to provide one of eight different battle styles / skills. These limited-use skills range from “Attack” which provides a set of four attack oriented skills to “Space” which provide skills that allow the character to manipulate space to warp across the field to creating a purification field for any Oni in the vicinity. As with weapons, these Mitama can be improved to increase their battle proficiency or replaced with another obtained one at will.

While many of the sub-quests are mediocre tasks which range from Kill X of Y or something along those lines, you are not left without some bigger Oni to defeat within the first couple of hours. This is where player skill really comes into effect and may require some trial and error with weapon effectiveness etc. While they can be very enjoyable and provide ample challenge, the biggest issue is not with the game itself but the console it was released on. Targeting weak spots while at the same time performing skills didn’t lend itself to the portable console well, and with my fingers at least I found it near impossible to perform some of the tasks needed to complete such fights – particularily when performing select skills in a close third-person viewpoint.

The biggest enemy of Toukiden: The Age of Demons as with many other titles of its genre is that there is too much repetition going on, particularly if you don’t have any friends with the game to play ad-hoc multiplayer with. Even during its main campaign, the game is better off played in small bursts rather than for hours on end, and to me is hardly the game that invites one to play it for hours on end.

Final Words on Toukiden: The Age of Demons

At its core, Toukiden: The Age of Demons is a solid video game venture that could have a lot of potential to grow if Omega Force decides to branch out this new IP into a full-blown franchise. While the gameplay was enjoyable and there were many opportunities to make the player character “your own” in terms of customization and levelling, the repetitive nature of the gameplay and at times bland storyline kept it from being any more than just average. However expanding upon what was provided could very well see this being a strong new IP in the future.