Touken Ranbu

Players assume the role of a sage (審神者, saniwa) who travels into the past to defeat evil forces, and has the ability to animate legendary swords, which are depicted as attractive young men. Touken Ranbu is essentially a gender-swapped clone of Kantai Collection, another game by DMM, which uses moe anthropomorphism to portray historical warships as young girls. Character designs in Touken Ranbu are inspired by the type of sword they portray as well as the period of history they come from. Combat is largely automated, with progress mainly dependent on resource management and grinding.

Farming the four types of materials available in the game is required to forge and collect more swords. A number of actions in game are controlled by real time countdowns, such as repairs and forging or collecting new swords.

Touken Ranbu quickly became very popular in Japan, particularly with young women, and had over 1.5 million registered players by 2016. The game has been credited with accelerating the Japanese cultural trend of "katana women" (カタナ女子, katana joshi) – women who are interested in, and who pose with, historical Japanese swords. That trend had been started a few years previously with the Sengoku Basara video games, which made katana fans a distinct part of the Japanese subculture of female history aficionados (reki-jo). The popularity of Touken Ranbu was such that a Japanese women's interest magazine published an article about exercise routines based on sword fighting techniques from the game, and the 2015 Tokyo Wonder Festival's figure exhibition was reportedly "completely dominated by hot male swordsmen".

Based on a December 16, 2023, survey conducted by Nikkei Entertainment with almost 50,000 responses, the fanbase of Touken Ranbu within Japan has an average age of 34 years, and is almost exclusively female-dominated.