The last time I said anything substantial about Toukiden was over a year ago when it was revealed, from which it eventually released, sold and did all that over in Japan with nary a word of western shores in its sights. For some reason, I had thought Toukiden being localized was a foregone conclusion so when I heard that it was officially announced, I was a little confused at first. "Didn't we know this already?," I said and it turns out that we did not. So, good news everyone, Toukiden is releasing in North America (on carts! also digitally) as Toukiden: [The?] Age of Demons. (I'm seeing conflicting reports on whether or not the 'The' is there. It is superfluous anyway.) As far as I know, Toukiden isn't a real word, but it's damn fun to say, and a lot easier to figure out how to pronounce than Ys: Memories of Celceta, which I learned from experience last wednesday, but that's a topic for a different night.
That's the good news about the situation. The bad news begins to to the tune of the knowledge that the game is yet another Monster Hunter clone, but an actual really real one this time, not something that's just called a Monster Hunter clone because of poor reporting. However everything in that trailer above screams Monster Hunter, from the segmented maps, to the giant monsters, to the four-player co-op with the bars on the upper left side literally like the MH UI (though not unique to that game) to the hub town and you get the point. It's Monster Hunter with a side of Monster Hunter on a Monster Hunter plate in a Monster Hunter restaurant that calls itself Toukiden from KOEI and it's more than a little disappointing.
I'd personally hoped for something a little....less like that, clearly. While my enjoyment of the KOEI games is well-known here, I don't necessarily want them to only make hack-n-slash games, so while that's what I expected with this, I would have been happy to have been wrong in most cases. Perhaps with a proper Action-Adventure title, something along the lines of a Ninja Gaiden game, but actually fun, would have been great. As it is, I'm assured that Toukiden will at least be a little more fast-paced than Monster Hunter which is one of my issues with it, and I'm hoping there's more variation to the game than "go here, kill monster", but I don't know what to expect and I don't want to spoil it for myself by reading impressions on the Japanese version of it. It will serve me better to simply blindly pre-order and buy it and hopefully not be disappointed.
That is part of the other half of the bad news. The game is releasing in February of 2014 which is right dead-smack in the middle of Christmas II which just so happens to include March this year, meaning they decided to release it the Sega way; at a time where it has the least chance of being bought 'just because'. I'll be buying it because KOEI has so many fucking games to localize and I don't want them to be able to use their own shitty logic to leverage less and less localization projects because I fucking -want- to play these things. I want Dynasty Warriors 8 Xtreme Legends on my Vita, preferably with Dynasty Warriors 8 built into it, because I still don't know how DW8XL being on Vita/PS4 is going to work when DW8 proper is on PS3 and the selling thing of Xtreme Legends in the past has always been connecting the two games to expand on the original. Despite my whinging, it does look like a nice game and seems capable of tricking everyone into forgetting that it's not actual Monster Hunter, but rather something close enough like it that they can just play it instead. Because damned if a Monster Hunter wouldn't help matters. CAPCOM.
I just want to run around maps and cut things and not worry about small areas and hrrrgh
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