With Samurai Warriors 5 launching in just a few months, Koei Tecmo have started to unveil the sequel’s cast of playable characters.
Two new additions have just been unveiled by the Japanese publisher with returning favourites Nagamasa Azai and Oichi making their Samurai Warriors 5 debut. The pair were revealed in a post on social media, showing off their new appearances.
Oichi and Nagamasa Azai new designs were revealed today! What do you think of their new look?https://t.co/b8qVw0xuKG#KTfamily #SW5 pic.twitter.com/Es45HwB8Mj
— KOEI TECMO AMERICA (@KoeiTecmoUS) March 7, 2021
In truth, they don’t appear to look dramatically different compared to their previous appearances in other Samurai Warriors games. However, they’ve both undergone a wardrobe change while also being redesigned to suit SW5’s new brushstroke art style.
Koei have confirmed that Samurai Warriors 5 will launch with a rebooted roster of 27 characters, mostly comprised of returning favourite though reportedly with some new additions too. That’s half the size of Samurai Warrior 4’s playable roster (55) and considerably smaller than Dynasty Warrior 9 (90). While part of the appeal of these games has been the number of different heroes you can play as, we’re interested to see what developer Omega Force can do when focusing on a smaller roster, hopefully making each of them feel more unique.
Confirmed characters include Nobunaga Oda, Mitsuhide Akechi, Ieyasu Tokugawa, Hideyoshi Hashiba, Nō, and Yoshimoto Imagawa, alongside newcomer Mitsuki.
Now, if you’re a huge Samurai Warrior fans, then there’s a good chance you will be able to pick out many of the characters simply by looking at their silhouettes from the image above. Even with their completely rebooted designs, we can pick out a few including Hanzo Hattori, Shingen Takeda, and Kenshin Uesugi. A cursory knowledge of the Sengoku era and its chief warlords should also help fill in some of those blanks.
Samurai Warriors 5 will launch on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC (via Steam) worldwide on July 27th, 2021.
In other Warriors series news, Koei Tecmo recently confirmed that Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires has been delayed. The spin-off was originally meant to launch in Spring 2021.
