Making My Way Through The Sword Boy Game

As I’m duty bound to buy everything that Koei’s internal Omega Force team has even a small hand in, I’m now a little over seven hours into this week’s hot new Nintendo Switch release Touken Ranbu Warriors. It’s a crossover between the Dynasty Warriors franchise and an IP that mostly targets women and started as a mobile/browser based card game.

In the original game, you collect hundreds of different cards with men on them that are anthropomorphic representations of historical swords, and then they do battle with an army that’s trying to change history. The Warriors game follows a similar concept, but it only has sixteen total characters.

It’s an interesting effort for a variety of reasons. The lead studio on the game was Ruby Party, which is Koei’s internal visual novel team and notable for being mostly staffed by women. This is the team’s first hack and slash action game, and their first game to get a worldwide localized release in spite of the studio having a thirty year history. Design-wise, it’s meant to be a bit more accessible than the usual Warriors title, but I don’t think it always hits that mark.

I’m planning to write a full review it once I’ve finished the game…probably sometime next week. The weirdest thing about it from my personal perspective is that it’s supposed to be fun for women to play, yet it’s not that great from a representation standpoint. Every character in the game is a dude—and I mean every character. In seven hours of play, none of the characters, or NPCs, or enemies, or side characters has been a woman.

That’s a little bit strange, in a vacuum. Yes, I know that this comes from a place where there are also games full of anime girls that are supposed to be for men to enjoy, and this is a gender swapped version of that. But it’s also a little ironic that as the industry is finally begrudgingly moving in a more representative direction—here is a game made mostly by women, for women…that has no women in it.

I’m in no way saying that women won’t enjoy this or that I am in any way the arbiter of what women will enjoy. But as someone who likes more representation of all kinds in gaming in general, I always go out of my way to choose characters that are the furthest from the dude stereotypes that have been shoved down gamers’ throats for generations. And it’s also bizarre that where the Warriors franchise has dozens and dozens of games that arguably targeted men first—all of the other games in the series have prominent playable women in them and additional women who are important to their stories.

I still think Touken Ranbu Warriors is fun, and if you’re into the idea of a bunch of time traveling sword boys then you’ll have a great time regardless of your gender identity. In fact, in bringing this to the west I probably would have called it “The Sword Boys Go On An Adventure” just to better express its tone. The characters in the game do push a little bit against the sort of Space Marine standard that you’d expect from male game protagonists, but they don’t go beyond the five or six broader stereotypes that men usually get shoved into in a Dynasty Warriors game. You’ve got your quiet stoic guys, your quirky guys, your thoughtful guys, and your guy that looks young but is actually old.

And also a magical fox.

I hope this game does well because I love that Ruby Party got to make a Warriors game and I hope they’ll get to do so again. Even if all of its changes don’t totally work for me, they’ve still made an interesting and different game.

Still, I can’t help but think they could have put some women into their game for women.. Maybe the franchise holder would be upset—but this would have been a great time to introduce some new swords for a new audience. Or maybe some kind of sword creator that let you customize your own character.

The notion of a bunch of pretty anime sword boys hacking their way through a Warriors game is both fresh for being different, and sadly tired when held up against the dozens of video games out there that don’t have any meaningful female characters in them. Again, I know that this is trying to be a “you should fawn over these men” sort of game, but it doesn’t even have the plucky self-insert protagonist who falls through a time portal that so many of these stories use to great effect.

If you’d like to read more of my early thoughts on this game, I also wrote about it on Medium. As Omega Force seems to be back at full speed following pandemic-related production slowdowns, I’m also excited to check out the new Fire Emblem Warriors in a month.