Toukiden: The Age of Demons landed in Japan on June 27, 2013, built by Omega Force and published by Koei Tecmo for the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita. It is a third-person monster hunting game, the opening entry in a new franchise, and it asks players to become a demon-fighting warrior known as a Slayer.
It is also, plainly, a game about killing large things with three friends and a great deal of patience. That is not a knock. It is the pitch, and Toukiden executes it well enough to earn a 7.8 out of 10.
Utakata Village Gives the Hunts Their Stakes
The premise is set in a fantasy world with medieval Japanese themes, particularly Shinto. Warriors called mononofu — localised as “slayer” in the western release — specialise in fighting oni and form teams to hunt them. Eight years before the story begins, a great demon emerged from the underworld and brought an era of calamity to the land of Nakatsu Kuni, which the mononofu had traditionally protected since ancient times.
The protagonist and main characters reside at Utakata Village, one of the final lines of defense against the demons. That village is the hub. Players accept quests there, then venture out to battle monstrous and deadly Oni before they destroy all of humanity. Party members can be pulled from a supporting cast of characters, or up to three other players can join through ad-hoc mode.
The loop is clean, and the game is smart enough not to overcomplicate it. You take a quest, you leave, you fight, you come back stronger. The village is not decoration. It is the reason the hunts have stakes.
Mitama Carry the Real Depth
Each player can customize their choice of weapons, armor and skills. The real system sits underneath that: special abilities come from souls, or mitama, collected as the game progresses.
Mitama level up by gaining experience from battles, or by paying a certain sum of haku. Different mitama carry abilities with various characteristics and fall into groups such as offensive, defensive or recovery mitama. That is a genuine build system, not a stat screen. It gives a hunting game the one thing the genre often lacks — a reason to think about your loadout between fights rather than just sharpen the same blade.
When a monster dies, players or NPCs can “purify” it, which collects items useful in upgrading weapons and armor. Monsters fall into small and large oni, with the large oni serving as boss-type enemies. The loop closes: hunt, purify, upgrade, hunt again.
The Large Oni Are Where the Game Bites
Toukiden is a third-person monster hunting game that employs groups of players or NPCs fighting together against various monsters during quests. That sentence describes most of what you do for dozens of hours, and the game knows it.
The small oni are fodder. The large oni are the point. Fights against them are where the weapon and mitama choices actually get tested, and where the co-operative structure pays off.
Missions can be played co-operatively through an ad-hoc WiFi connection or over the internet. Additional missions arrive as downloadable content. That matters more than it sounds. A hunting game lives or dies on whether there is enough to hunt, and Toukiden keeps adding to the pile.
Toukiden is a third-person monster hunting game which employs groups of players or NPCs fighting together against various monsters during quests.
A Franchise That Started on the Right Foot
Toukiden: The Age of Demons is the first entry in a new franchise, and it behaves like one. It is expansive, influenced by historical and traditional Japanese elements, and confident enough to build a world rather than a single arena.
Tecmo Koei Games showcased the PlayStation Vita version at E3 2013, and released the game within North America on February 11, 2014, exclusively on PlayStation Vita. The Japanese release had come the previous June. A sequel, Toukiden 2, followed in 2016 on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.
That is a fast turnaround for a new property, and it suggests the first game did its job. Sequels do not get greenlit for franchises nobody played.
Repetition Is the Tax It Pays
The game leans hard on its structure, and structure can only carry so much. Quests repeat. The supporting cast exists largely to fill party slots. The story of the great demon and the land of Nakatsu Kuni sets up a world but rarely pushes past setup.
None of that is fatal. It is the standard tax on a first entry in a hunting franchise, and Toukiden pays it without embarrassing itself. The combat is solid, the mitama system gives it texture, and the co-op works.
What it does not do is surprise you. If you have hunted monsters in a group before, you know this rhythm. Toukiden is a well-built version of a thing you have played, not a reinvention of it.
What the 7.8 Reflects
Toukiden: The Age of Demons is a strong first step for a franchise that clearly wanted to be more than a one-off. It builds a world in Nakatsu Kuni, gives it a home in Utakata Village, and hands players a combat system with real depth in the mitama.
The score is fair. It rewards a game that does the fundamentals well and does not pretend to be more than it is. The small oni are forgettable, the quests blur together after a while, and the story never quite matches the ambition of its setting.
But the large oni fights land, the purification loop gives every kill a purpose, and the co-op structure makes the whole thing better with other people. That is the core of a hunting game, and Toukiden gets the core right.
For a franchise debut, that is enough. The sequel came two years later and expanded the platform list. Whatever Toukiden became, it started here, and it started well.
Hard Numbers
- Title: Toukiden: The Age of Demons
- Developer: Omega Force
- Publisher: Koei Tecmo
- Platforms: PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita
- Japan release: June 27, 2013
- North America release: February 11, 2014 (PlayStation Vita only)
- Genre: Action role-playing game
- Modes: Single player, multiplayer, co-operative
- Perspective: Third person
- Critic aggregate score: 7.8/10 (7 outlets)
- Sequel: Toukiden 2, 2016 (PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita)
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