Toukiden / Toukiden Extreme

I've been looking for the Vita game, seen a few places at £24.99, though delivery seems to be like a week away. Patience is not one of my virtues.

I pre-ordered from Amazon on wednesday and it arrived today. That's with Prime though.

You get some bonus armour for carrying a save over. There's the armour of the two new female characters, or two versions of Yamato's armour, depending on what gender your character is.

Another new addition is Infinite Missions, which are survival/boss rush missions. They should be a lot of fun online.

Same place I ordered from, but I don't have Prime so it'll be a few days yet. Still haven't really spent much time with the demo, so got plenty of time to practice again.

Okay, that didn't take long. I didn't realise Amazon send via courier, so hadn't thought a sunday delivery possible, but there we go.

I imported all my save data over, and had the choice of starting the story all over again or picking up where I left off. I chose the latter. Some of the new mechanics are very interesting; the team super move, for instance, can one-shot a full health Manhunter. No, not a powerful foe per se, but interesting nontheless, and the bow has an additional move that lets you target an individual part of a boss with as many arrows as you have the focus to make. One annoying part you can't break? Hit it twenty times in one salvo, watch it fly off.

I'd assume the other weapons have similar new tricks as well. Kiwami is off to a great start, let's hope it continues to impress.

Deliberation really adds a lot to the bow's potential. Before it was great for breaking parts but I couldn't really pick any styles or builds that would be particularly good for. Whereas now there's already a few cool ideas I have. A Speed Bow could be a ton of fun.

sim how did you import your save if you didn't have the original game?

You only need Age of Demons if you're moving from Vita to PS4, as you need to download and install a patch for AoD . From Vita to Vita there's an option in the menu screen in Kiwami which simply pulls everything across without any faffing about.

Oh that's nice. Once you get to chapter 10, Mitama can be upgraded to level 12. When they reach it they get a permanent 4th boost, and you can swap out all the other boosts freely.

I guessed they could be upgraded further, but I'm still in chapter eight and Shikimi just says she isn't yet experienced enough or some such. I've gottne a couple of very strong temporary buffs from bathing with characters who have the Ultimate soulmate status (Hayatori and Oka currently), which were very nice.

This is likely a stupid question, but it's been a while since I played vanilla Toukiden. Kiwami starts you at chapter eight. Therefore I assumed, because I couldn't remember and didn't think to check, that AoD must have finished at chapter seven. However, looking at the cut-scene and story listings in the in-game house, the final chapter - where you defeat the Cimmerian King - appears to have been chapter five. Chapters six and seven are literally blank.

So, what happened in those chapters? Have I just missed them by skipping to the new content, or were they in AoD and Kiwami is just buggy when it comes to mentioning them?

Yeah i noticed that to, although i'm still playing AoD, I intend to finish chapter 7 and phase 10 in the next week then grab kiwami at some point. I'll likely play the vanilla stuff again with my nephew and play with one of the new weapon types or just change sporadically.

BTW how is the rifle i fiddled with it for all of ten seconds in the demo and though wtf.

The rifle is a bit odd.  Granted, I haven't really spent enough time with it to get any kind of rhythm going with it, but you basically need to pick a mitama which give you the ammo type you desire (there are six types, but each mitama will only have three of those six to choose from) and use your own resource management to decide when to pump out damage and when to reload.  It's less stamina-dependant than the bow, but also less forgiving as there's no homing shots to fall back on and you need to hit the target areas manually.

Haven't tried the club beyond the training session, but the Naginata is good fun.

Also, if you do get Kiwami there are a couple of free Mitama available for download on PSN on both Vita and PS4.

Chapters 6 and 7 were the bonus end-game chapters, where all the bosses dropped new items, and all the levels had new items in them.

This game seems awful after playing soul sacrifice delta, its really slow paced and grindy. It certainly still has some charm, my biggest gripe is just how long it takes to kill big monsters, fights feel more like battles of attrition.

Toukiden is slower-paced than SSD, but no less grindy.

SimianWonder wrote:

Toukiden is slower-paced than SSD, but no less grindy.

In Soul sacrifice delta did you actually need to replay a level?  I personally found I could just play new missions the whole way through, admittedly I was just using spears the most part, but you don't need to actually farm things like armour and weapon parts as there's no equipment just the spells and those can be easily fused.

I will admit that level I showed you I played a bunch of times but that was because it made prestiging super easy and i wanted the 100% damage boosts lol.

EDIT: Damn the defence mitamas are freaking amazing I'm trying to finish off the hard missions and they make them a joke.

To beat the main story required some, but not much, grinding in Delta. If you wanted end-game gear though, it was just as grindy as most of the genre. Alice's labyrinth was only really possible if you'd prestige'd a few times and to get many of the top level spells you needed materials in quantities only earned by replaying missions over and over.

SimianWonder wrote:

To beat the main story required some, but not much, grinding in Delta.  If you wanted end-game gear though, it was just as grindy as most of the genre.  Alice's labyrinth was only really possible if you'd prestige'd a few times and to get many of the top level spells you needed materials in quantities only earned by replaying missions over and over.

I'm guessing you didn't do the missions you can do online completely if you did those you'd have enough spells I'm pretty sure with minimal grinding (I need to do those to, tell me when you end up revisiting the game).  My main point is there's enough missions tht you can play once to get a arsenal capable of tackling a lot of things, remember the difference between the two games is the rewards for SSD are set.  It doesn't have an RNG, unless you choose fate but lets face it buliding an arsenal with those guys is a little silly.  So i can say oh i need to break this bosses parts one more time, in toukiden I may have to kill a bladewing 5 times and still not get a floating rock (this happened to me just now and i'm very annoyed about it >_>).

Man, Im still going at this at a snails pace. *currently lacking motovation*

I'm doing a couple of missions a day, bite-sized chunks. The story is coming to a close, I'm in no real rush to finish it just yet.

i'm on phase 10 on vanilla i'm going to try and finish it then, i will be setup for getting kiwami when i feel like it lol.

The story finished in Chapter 12, and after that there's a Chapter 13 for bonus stuff. It introduces the Ultimate missions. Like the Expert missions, every level and boss has moren new items to get to craft better versions of the previous equipment.

So that's where they are, the ultimate versions of the Oni i mean. in the bonus chapters i would assume.

Man i really gotta pull my self together and progress...

Man, those ultimate Oni sure do take a while to kill prolly around 15mins per one *sigh*
Still going at this at a snails pace ugh....

Thats one of the things that really put me off getting this game, your move set doesn't expand throughout the game, so i'll just be hitting things for a very long time.