Touken Ranbu


Touken Ranbu is a free-to-play collectible card browser video game developed by Nitroplus and DMM Games. It is only available in Japan and was released on January 14, 2015. It has been adapted as three anime series, stage musicals, stage plays, and a feature film.

Gameplay

Players assume the role of a sage who travels into the past to defeat evil forces, and has the ability to animate legendary swords, which are depicted as attractive young men. Touken Ranbu is essentially a gender-swapped clone of Kantai Collection, another game by DMM, which anthropomorphizes historical warships as young girls. Combat is largely automated, with progress mainly dependent on resource management and grinding.

Reception

Touken Ranbu quickly became very popular in Japan, particularly with young women, and had over 1.5 million registered players by 2016. The game has been credited with accelerating the Japanese cultural trend of "katana women" – women who are interested in, and who pose with, historical Japanese swords. That trend had been started a few years previously with the Sengoku Basara video games, which made katana fans a distinct part of the Japanese subculture of female history aficionados. The popularity of Touken Ranbu was such that a Japanese women's interest magazine published an article about exercise routines based on sword fighting techniques from the game, and the 2015 Tokyo Wonder Festival's figure exhibition was reportedly "completely dominated by hot male swordsmen".

Related media

Anime

The game has received three anime adaptations. The first is by Doga Kobo, the second is Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu by Ufotable, and the third is Zoku Touken Ranbu: Hanamaru.

Stage plays

Touken Ranbu has inspired a series of 2.5D stage plays and musicals since 2016. The stage plays and musicals were both announced simultaneously in 2015 with different companies and cast members behind the two separate productions. ', produced with Nelke Planning, first ran in October 30, 2015. ', produced by Marvelous and Dentsu, began running on May 3, 2016.

Film

A live-action film adaptation was released on January 18, 2019. The cast from reprised their roles. The film was distributed by Toho and Universal Pictures, directed by Saiji Yakumo, and written by Yasuko Kobayashi.