I’ve always seen the Empires editions of Warriors games as a sort of choose your own adventure versions of the main series. You’ve got the whole cast of the game and now you can choose how you want to conquer/unite China or Japan along with having your own take on dealing with the political side of things. More recent games have included a pretty robust custom character creator, but here in an Empires title, it feels like it can be properly utilized to a greater degree.

Now there’s dozens of character slots available and if you’ve played Samurai Warriors 4-II, you can also import your characters into this title. A new addition is ability to swap in one of your custom characters in place for an existing officer in the game so that custom character would appear in battle and any cutscenes instead. When creating your own characters, there’s dozens of options you can choose from and even once you’ve selected the parts you want to use, you’re able to further customise these through going into the next set of menus and sliders. You also have the option of importing images from a USB drive as the character’s portrait picture in battle as well as custom images that display when performing a Musou attack. So as a bit of fun, we decided to bring in a few characters into the Samurai Warriors universe and see how they play and turn out. Starting off, let’s go with some favourite Koei Tecmo characters.

Starting off with one of Tecmo’s most iconic characters from Dead or Alive is Kasumi. It was pretty easy to create recreate her aside from the costume and I felt like I couldn’t get her eyes right. I wanted to go for a more of a fierce look but I wasn’t really happy with what I was coming up with. Recreating the costume requires a bit of creativity however, as the costumes are based around more traditional clothing from the era Samurai Warriors set. Some of the costumes are quite outlandish but they all look in place with time and setting. So Kasumi’s iconic dress isn’t available as seen but by combining different bits of armour sets and making sure you’re using that character’s iconic colours, you can get something that resembles that costume for the most part.

After creating Kasumi, I wanted to make Ryu from Ninja Gaiden but where his appearance is more about his costume rather than his actual appearance I decided to pass on him as he would have just looked like a generic ninja. Keeping the theme of ninjas however, I decided to take on Kasumi’s brother, Hayate.

Again with Hayate the trickiest part was recreating the costume. I was going for his look in Dead or Alive 5 where he’s more of a modern armoured ninja but the set above came closest to that look. Getting the colours right proved to be problematic as a lot of the armours have two colour tones and selecting black would also give him a brighter red against his armour. In the end, I settled on purple as it kept his costume dark and sort of resembled his original look.

For my next character, I decided I should step out of Tecmo Koei’s library and just go for something that would never appear in the game normally. I’m playing Rune Factory 4 at the moment and figured why not just stick Dolce in there.

I think Dolce turned out to be the best of the three I had created which was a bit of a surprise. I was a bit worried about how well I’d be able to recreate her frilly gothic look but it turned out nicely. Another concern I had with Dolce is that she’s a magic user who uses a staff and sends out her ghost BFF Pico as a weapon. By mimicking Aya, Dolce got a staff that looked the part though it didn’t provide her with the magic aspect of her character.

Have you created any custom characters in Samurai Warriors 4 Empires? Show us some of your creations in the comments below!