Koei Tecmo has just released a new trailer for their new game, Samurai Warriors: Spirit of Sanada.
The trailer focuses on revealing the newest additions to the cast, including Masayuki Sanada, head of the titular Sanada clan, and Sasuke, a pretty-boy ninja under the group’s employ. In true Samurai Warriors fashion, each new character has a unique way of battling and offer players new ways of cleaving through the hundreds of soldiers standing in your way.
Additionally, one can catch glimpses of the game’s intriguing storytelling aspect in the trailer, namely that the main characters age as the story progresses. You can actually see Yukimura Sanada, one of the series’ protagonists, progress through being a wide-eyed child, a hot-blooded youth and a cynical, haggard (beardy) adult. This is an unusual feature for the series, which typically only had one appearance for each character, even when years were supposed to have passed. While the Samurai Warriors games have always been very competent at telling their stories (as one would hope, considering they’re all based on the same sequence of events), this component promises to help make the player understand the passage of time much more easily.
Some other parts of the trailer to take note of are that large-scale battles will be fought over several maps and levels, and there is at least some level of an exploration element in the game. The former feature should help to sell to players just how vast and epic the battles will be, and the latter is presumably used to help give interludes between the large-scale battles.
Samurai Warriors: Spirit of Sanada was officially released on November 23rd, 2016 in Japan, but it will be coming to western territories in late May 2017 for PS4 and PC.