Travel through a beautiful, fictional rendition of the 16th century of Feudal Japan, on a symbolic campaign representing a personal trial of life and death of a lost loved one. Experience multiple levels and game modes to bring peace or chaos, in (up to) 24 player online battles.

Beyond the philosophical implications of the game’s backstory, Hanako: Honor & Blade takes players online for immersive battles in a beautiful recreation of Feudal Japan between up to 24 players. Players can help decide the future of a nation by playing as one of four distinct warrior classes including the capable swordsman, powerful spearman, eagle-eyed archer, or nimble ninja. Each class has different build/skill options and features directionally driven combat, abilities, and spirit-based skills to get an extra edge. Players will play as one of two clans and seek to defeat opponents through multiple game modes and maps, enjoying a game that is easy to learn, yet difficult to master.

Master Combat through the discovery of different attacks, abilities, and combos. The combat system features multiple offensive stances driven by your movement, defensive techniques (such as the grappling hook) and abilities (ranging from acrobatic combos to multi-enemy sweeps to multi-hit combos).

Hanako: Honor & Blade offers a multiplayer experience with several modes of gameplay taking familiar elements and expanding them to fit the game's backstory and to introduce fun and engaging new experiences. Combat is based on your movement direction and supplemented by abilities ranging from strong stunning dashes, to multi-hit combos and Master level abilities.

Each game level is designed to present unique obstacles and mechanics that will require strategy and teamwork to defeat enemies. Destructible objectives such as castle gates, meditation ritual sites to buff your team (or debuff the enemy team!), and dynamic environment changes are just a few of the things that keep the battlefield experience engaging and varied. Combat can be enhanced with Ki, a managed resource that can be spent on a multitude of mechanics including blocking attacks, sprinting, meditation, and class-specific skills. Precision and accuracy are vital as players engage in either close quarters or ranged combat and polish their battle skills. Each class has two styles of combat, allowing players to creatively adapt to different battle scenarios, avoiding hack-n-slash monotony.

Three months since its official launch, +Mpact Games announced that it has decided as a dev team that is in their best interest, as a small independent game, to go Free-to-play as soon as possible to give its multiplayer title the best chance at reaching more players.

Why F2P?

We worked on Hanako, with everything we have, during our free time for 14 years and our launch, quite frankly has been a tremendous disappointment because we think we made a near-AAA quality multiplayer game, but never had the exposure, support or budget (Hanako was made with $0) to adequately get eyes on it. So we want to remove the barrier to entry and let as many people as could put their eyes on it, to play and hopefully get enough influx of new players to fill up servers, even scale them up and turn our focus to providing more content, new classes, maps, modes, etc.

Despite being a team of 4 people, doing this after work, we have built our item store up to about 75 items (when we ship the F2P patch) and believe there's enough there to make this shift.

What if I bought the game already?

We will be offering in-game items in our Discord by showing us proof-of-purchase (steam key or receipt email/screenshot showing your Steam ID) via a DLC key or some other means. We're still working out the specifics on this and are happy to offer something like that, especially as a thank you for supporting us and continuing to want to play and have access to the game.

Free-to-Play Patch Preview

We'll be releasing our first major patch with this change on December 10th. This will feature over 24 new items in our item store, addressing of the top feedback items from launch feedback gathering, refund notes, forum posts, testing, etc. and other fixes we've run into.

• Improved hit impact/feedback: New "ripout" system for melee classes, to have successful hits "stick" and "Rip out" of enemies for more visceral feel. Also our new ability/combo hit system that includes combo counter numbers, additional particle FX and presentation.
• Two new full item sets: Unicorn set & Kintsukuroi set added for purchase in the item store. These bundles include: Skins for all classes & weapons, helmet, hat, mask & hair (Unicorn set only for Hair). Items can be individually purchased as well.
• Improvements to hit detection/consistency of hits.
• Fixes for various server crashes and issues.
• Localization updates, fixes to variety of missing text/strings in non-English langauges.

What happens after F2P Patch?

We will be keeping a close eye on how player numbers change and our development roadmap and we will become public testing of our Samurai Royale (battle royale) mode and iterating towards a new BR map/mode patch release and adding more item sets. Should the game earn a self-sustaining playerbase we will move into retention mechanics like daily/weekly/monthly challenges, achievement-based item unlocks (some exist in-game already) and expanding giving you guys more reasons to keep coming back.

We'd like to thank all of you for your support, especially those that participated in Early Access testing. We know it's been a slow burn, and we see everyone's reviews/comments/feedback about the player base, we hate it as much as you do and this is why we're doing what we're doing.

-Hanako Dev Team

Key Features

• Epic online battles set in Feudal Japan with up to 24 players
• A symbolic struggle between the forces of life and death
• Four game modes with unique features, including team deathmatch Battle, Capture the Scroll, Village Siege, and Castle Raid
• Directional-driven combat that encourages strategy and precision
• Four distinct warrior classes with different skill options for multiple playstyles
• Dynamic environment changes

Hanako: Honor & Blade is available for PC (Steam).