Tokyo Game Show 2025: Hands On With Arknights: Endfield, Nioh 3 & More!

Published on: September 28th, 2025 by The HLJ Team

Tokyo Game Show 2025: Hands On With Upcoming Titles!

Tokyo Game Show 2025 is already on its fourth and final event day, and the HLJ team were lucky enough to attend across several days, seeing a wide variety of new and upcoming game releases!

Yesterday, we dropped a fun round-up of all the latest merchandise and hobby goods that we saw at the event, including a variety of products that are currently available to preorder or order In Stock at HLJ.com.

In addition to our look at the event in terms of figures, kits, character goods and our area of expertise, we also wanted to go beyond our usual scope and give you some impressions of our most anticipated titles that we were able to get hands-on with at the show!

Arknights: Endfield

Judging from the stats we see every day, Arknights as a franchise seems to be really popular with HLJ’s community. It’s a series that seems to have won people’s hearts with some refreshing tower defense gameplay, unique ‘techwear’ urban sci-fi aesthetics, and cute character design in a familiar gacha-focused mobile game format.

It wasn’t necessarily surprising to me, therefore, to hear that Arknights would be getting many more franchise entries including things like an anime and a fully featured console game. Few popular mobile games manage to make the transition over to the triple-A console space, and even fewer manage to do so elegantly and successfully.

Arknights: Endfield, however, impressed me with a strong commitment to the mobile game’s concepts and lore and a simple but effective action RPG feel that I thought was vaguely reminiscent of NieR: Automata or other character action games from the last decade - attack combos, perfect dodges and a set number of special AoE skills on cooldown.

In the demo that we played, we ran through a story sequence that featured some fun zip-line action, a handful of simple enemy encounters and a much larger boss fight that also introduced the game’s team-up mechanics, which utilise characters from the existing Arknights mobile game. Tap a button and you could have another character hop in to perform a quick combo, but hold it down and they perform a more elaborate, heavy damage special attack. Fans of the Arknights characters will likely get a kick out of seeing their favorite ‘operator’ characters appear.

There are also a lot of other modes in the game that haven’t been fully elaborated on yet, and it looks set to include a variety of mechanics like base building and resource management in some capacity, but for now, the story prologue satisfied us with a taste of what’s to come.

The game had an incredibly stylish approach to UI, design and some excellent animations that really helped the demo pop off visually, and that might be one of the game’s core strengths. Despite still being under active development with no release date other than a 2026 window attached. Our team thoroughly enjoyed our time with it, and we look forward to learning a lot more about the game, and how our favorite Arknights characters might make their debut in Endfield!

Nioh 3

The Nioh series is never one I’ve paid much attention to, but our team also got to get hands on with this title at Tokyo Game Show 2025, and we were all pleasantly surprised!

Nioh 3 is shaping up to be an excellent evolution of what came before that made the first two Nioh games so critically well-received.

A blend of fast-paced souls-like gameplay and a high-energy tour through horror-tinged Japanese mythology, our 15 minutes with Nioh 3 made it clear that anyone who liked the first two games won’t be disappointed with this release. Like its predecessors, Nioh sketches out a unique dark fantasy world with plenty of yokai, oni.

The demo showcased only a few enemy encounters and a very difficult boss fight, placing emphasis on the importance of switching forms between a more familiar katana-wielding mode that allowed for stance switching and a more fast-paced, agile tonfa-wielding 'ninja' mode that allowed for better traversal and faster item usage.

Although our team wasn’t able to defeat the boss in the short window we were given with Nioh 3, we all felt that the game had been very precisely constructed for maximum satisfaction with weighty and satisfying strikes that had impact. Like many of the best in this genre, Nioh 3 rewarded careful movement and study of the enemy’s patterns and taking a bit of time to adapt your strategy after a death, which will undoubtedly happen again and again if you’re not careful!

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

We also got hands on with the new Legend of Zelda title - Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, a new ‘warriors’ style (‘musou’) title set in the prequel era of acclaimed titles Breath of The Wild and Tears of The Kingdom.

It had been a while since I had played a ‘warriors’ title and I was surprised to see and feel how the genre has evolved in my time away from it. The demo itself allowed players to control Zelda and Rauru in a dynamic encounter in The Depths, using a wide variety of Zonaite technology and magic to defeat enemies.

If you’ve played a ‘warriors’ game before then the core structure is the same, but the fun you’ll find here is largely going to be in the new Zelda lore, character movesets and the wild combination attacks you can pull off by switching fast between characters and skills. Stacking up damage by using Zelda’s light magic and Rauru’s polearm attacks in rapid succession was frenetic and fun, and even in the short demo we played, there was a lot of potential variety in how you could approach your combat strategy.

In addition, now-iconic ‘Breath of The Wild Era’ Zelda designs are given a fresh coat of paint and look fantastic in this title, with ran smoothly even at the height of the game’s visual crowding during enemy-heavy encounters.

If you enjoyed the previous Hyrule Warriors titles, this is looking to be more of the same but in a good way, promising to linkup to the story to other titles in the same universe that we’ve come to love.

If you’re a fan of Tears of The Kingdom and you’re anticipating this release, we also have action iconic figures of characters Zelda and Ganondorf in their TOTK appearances both In Stock!

Yakuza Kiwami 3 Dark Ties

Finally, our hands-on experiences at TGS culminated with a playthrough of the demo of the new remake in the Ryuu Ga Gotoku series Yakuza Kiwami 3, as well as the new additional game Dark Ties game that comes bundled with it. We saw and played both at the event!

Kiwami 3 is a reinvisioned version of the classic third instalment in the series, with completely overhauled visuals, combat gameplay and new content to match the rest of the series.

The new ‘Dark Ties’ experience will be a treat for existing fans, choosing to flesh out the story of Yoshitaka Mine, the antagonist of the original third game. In the demo itself, we saw a glimpse of the story and Mine’s first moves into the criminal underworld of Japan, as well as a refined form of RGG’s modern action combat system.

For those who prefer RGG’s action combat to the turn-based style of recent entries like Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, there’s a lot on offer here, as the system has been polished to a mirror sheen and added some flashy new combat mechanics that allow Mine to easily pull of long combos of aerial attacks, grapples and throws. In addition, Mine can build up a meter of ‘dark awakening’ charges, which can be spent to power up his attacks even further. It all flows together very nicely, and it might end up being considered the series’ best combat system by the time it releases.

If you’re already ‘all in’ on the Like A Dragon series, Yakuza Kiwami 3 is a longtime fan’s dream, and we’re excited to see further reveals on this title before its release next year!

Find More Video Game Merchandise and Figures at HLJ!

If you enjoyed our hands-on coverage of some titles from this year’s Tokyo Game Show 2025, we also offer a range of video game merchandise, figures, model kits and more directly from Japan. Check out our merchandise round up from the Tokyo Game Show show floor and check out the rest of our site for the world’s most comprehensive selection of Japanese Hobby Goods and information.