KATANA Project CompleteBox Kouka Kenran (KATANA Project CompleteBox 煌花絢爛) Review

A lot of young kids who’ve just gotten into Japanese otaku culture tend to pick up some misconceptions, putting on a filter of assumed truth: that Japanese people are earnest, professional, reliable, down-to-earth.

Most of that comes from Japan’s rigid personality, the various reigning “masters” (sennin) of every craft, and the healthy growth of niche hobby groups everywhere. Sure, plenty of retro subcultures can find their fanbase in Japan, along with the meticulously researched material those groups put out…

But there are two sides to everything. Japanese people are also utterly shameless about grabbing your money.

Amusecraft has a pile of labels under it, most of them used once and tossed like toilet paper. One of them, CRYSTALiA, was created from the start to launch a new KATANA project — the theme being a futuristic world telling the story of “blades” and “samurai.” To hammer home the tech angle, they set the katana up as something like a smartphone: a high-tech device with its own OS that you can even hack into. The game even added a route for the blonde girl specifically to flesh out this setting. That route has no “samurai” or “duels” — it’s all about developing and controlling this high-tech katana with its built-in chip called “Orikami.”

The original heroine was Uwakami Sakuya, a complete protagonist template — built-in overpowered cheat, final awakening to defeat the inner demon and all that. As for the white-haired Tsubaki, she was probably set up as more of an antagonist, like that rich girl in Aokana — born in Rome, there to contrast with the heroine’s excellence.

But everyone knows how it went. After release, the heroine got no attention, the white-haired girl blew up in popularity, and the blonde was forgotten so thoroughly nobody remembers where she went. The dev team had no shame either — to strike while the iron was hot and make money, they pushed out a series of sequels with the white-haired girl as the lead, even filling in her scattered setting and straight-up releasing stories for her three older sisters, until there was nothing left to milk.

And that “hackable high-tech weapon katana” setting from the beginning? Eaten and shat out long ago, never mentioned again. The whole series drifted back to traditional swordsman duels, plus some curse-magic background fluff. Futurism? Fuck that.

Because, as I said earlier, all the Suzakuin sisters’ stories are done, the dev team has no idea what to write anymore. I figure their biggest regret is locking in the number of Suzakuin sisters in the first game — if they could, they’d wish Tsubaki had nine older sisters. Now there’s no white-haired girl left to use as a heroine, so they broke out the last resort: “a battle royale.” Hence this “new chapter” bundled with a compilation release.

The new story: one day, the Suzakuin sisters all receive a strange invitation and get teleported to a parallel world for no reason. In this unreal space, sisters from different timelines can meet, and they’re forced to duel each other to see who’s the “strongest blade maiden.” But after a few fights, it turns out the mastermind is a huge piece of shit whose goal is to make the Suzakuin sisters kill each other, determine the strongest, and then absorb the strongest blade maiden’s power directly. The ending is simple too — the sisters join hands, off the bastard, the barrier breaks, and everyone returns to their own timeline and world. Story over.

The laziness of this story feels like the setup for Honor of Kings, League of Legends, or Heroes of the Storm. Parallel world? It’s literally the Nexus. The CGs don’t have much new combat content either. It reads more like one last harvest, and honestly that’s exactly what it is.

So you might ask, “You know this is a cash-grab harvesting game, so why write so much about it?”

Good question. Because I wrote about this game for a commercial piece, and wouldn’t it be a waste not to cobble the cut content into an article?

I just think the “hackable katana” setting in this series is genuinely cool, and seeing it abandoned for market reasons really shows this company has zero product conviction.