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Hello, Swordbringers.
This is GM Sword of the Lost Sword Development Team.

Today, I’m writing this developer note to share the detailed information about the collaboration we announced earlier this month.

Through this developer note, we hope to answer some of the questions you may have before the update.

Lost Sword X Senran Kagura: Collaboration Event Details

As many of you expected, the collaboration has been decided as a crossover with Senran Kagura.

The Senran Kagura collaboration will take place with the first update in March, and the featured characters are as follows:

Asuka

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Asuka, the main protagonist of Senran Kagura, will appear as the first character of this collaboration.

Asuka is designed as a Nature-element Front-position Knight, and will take on the role of fighting at the forefront of battle.

Since Asuka is an iconic character representing Senran Kagura, we will provide her in a way that allows all Swordbringers to obtain her without pressure.

By completing a Season Pass that costs 1 gold, you will be able to obtain her up to the Awakening stage (including the Asuka Pet).

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Hikage

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Hikage, a popular Senran Kagura character, will appear as a playable character.

Hikage is a Nature-element Center-position Archer, a character with strong firepower capable of sweeping away large groups of enemies.

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Yumi

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Yumi, one of the most popular characters representing Senran Kagura, will appear as a playable character.

Yumi is a Frost-element Rear-position Wizard, and will play a major role through powerful magic attacks and elemental synergy.

Collaboration Character Rules

For collaboration event characters, some rules differ from those of regular characters.

• In the Training system, they receive personal buffs, not global buffs. Since there are no global buffs, we plan to reduce the amount of resources required for training them.
• Collaboration characters do not affect the Round Table’s maximum level.

This decision was made to maintain the game’s long-term balance, considering the limited-time nature of collaboration characters.

These rules are not limited to the Senran Kagura collaboration—they will also apply to all future collaboration characters.

Collaboration Monetization Pre-Notice

We would like to share monetization-related details for the Senran Kagura collaboration in advance.

(1) Will Senran Kagura characters appear in summons?
Senran Kagura collaboration characters and pets will not appear in: Regular Summons, ★5 Summon Tickets, or ★5 Selection Tickets. As mentioned above, Asuka and the Asuka Pet will be obtainable up to Awakening through the 1 Gold Season Pass. Yumi, Hikage, and their pets can be obtained only through Pickup Summon.

(2) Can existing Diamonds and Pickup Summon Tickets be used?
Yes. In Pickup Summon, you can use your existing Diamonds and Pickup Character & Pet Summon Tickets to summon the collaboration characters and pets.

(3) Pre-notice for Senran Kagura package sales
Senran Kagura commemorative packages will be sold for cash through a dedicated tab. This is based on the licensing agreement conditions, and we wanted to inform you in advance through this developer note. However, packages added as popular products or limited products will be sold for Leon.

For this Senran Kagura collaboration, the monetization is designed so that you can fully enjoy it using the resources you already have. Going forward, we will carefully consider both content and monetization to avoid placing unnecessary burdens on you, and we will strive to provide more transparent and thorough advance notice.

Q&A

Q1. Critical Retry stress is piling up from Boss Raids. How will you address this?

As some characters have become central to the meta, the development team clearly recognizes that the stress caused by critical retries across raids and stages has increased. We are currently reviewing multiple options to fundamentally improve this issue.

Option 1: To reduce fatigue from repeated retries, we are considering a system where the attempt count is deducted immediately upon entry.

If applied, Boss Raid will—like the Colosseum—restrict manual Ultimate use, and battles will be adjustable only through additional tactical settings that will be introduced together.

We are also reviewing a method where, even if the game closes forcibly or a network issue occurs during combat, the server continues the battle and then calculates/applies the final result.

Option 2: We are reviewing the introduction of a new stat: “Critical Amplification.”

If Critical Hit Chance exceeds 100%, the excess amount converts into Critical Amplification.

Example: If Critical Hit Chance is 120%, Critical Amplification becomes 20%.

In the future, we also plan to broaden how Critical Hit Chance is provided so that: characters with low Critical Hit Chance can receive stable probability correction, and characters with high Critical Hit Chance can have excess values converted into Critical Amplification.

Our goal is to reduce stress from reattempting content while also enabling overall balance adjustments. We will carefully prepare improvements in a direction that reduces your stress.

Q2. The new stage boss “Vortigern” feels far stronger than previous bosses. Will you adjust it?

We received many opinions about the difficulty of the newly added stage boss “Vortigern.” In actual play, the perceived difficulty has been higher than expected, and we confirmed that clear performance differs depending on whether certain characters are owned.

We plan the following adjustments:
- Overall reduction of Vortigern’s skill values (Normal, Hard, Hell)
- Reduction of overly oppressive mechanics
- Improvements to clear stability

However, to avoid making the overall difficulty too low for Hell, the boss passive in Hell difficulty will be partially strengthened.

We will improve Normal/Hard into a more reasonable challenge structure, while keeping Hell as challenge content for experienced players.

Vortigern’s balance adjustments are planned for the second update in February, and we will prepare so that more reasonable strategies are possible.

Q3. Has the new character release cycle changed to every 2 weeks?

There is no officially fixed standard for timing or intervals, but we recognize that the recent two-week release pattern has increased fatigue.

Accordingly, we will not release new characters until the first update in March.

New character releases are planned after the collaboration, but we will adjust the pace to reduce your burden.

Q4. Is there sustainable content being developed besides Brawl (Previously introduced as Guild War)? New content additions feel slow.

We sincerely apologize again for the lack of smooth content delivery.

In addition to the content mentioned in this developer note, we are also working on quality-of-life improvements and planning/developing new content.

However, many items are still at a stage where schedules are not clearly confirmed, so we cannot provide specific details yet.

As soon as things are ready, we will share updates sequentially through developer notes.

Q5. You said the Senran Kagura collaboration will be added in the first update of March—are all characters added at once?

No. Not all collaboration characters will be revealed at once in the first March update. Asuka and Hikage will be released first, and Yumi will be added in the second update of March.

Q6. When will “Brawl” be released?

We previously stated in a developer note that it would be released in February, but during internal testing we found more balance and stability issues than expected, so the schedule has been adjusted.

Because Brawl is a core piece of long-term repeatable content, we judged it undesirable to release it without sufficient completeness.

We are currently developing and testing with a goal of introducing it no later than March.

We sincerely apologize for the confusion caused to those who have been waiting. We will do our best to deliver it in a more polished state.

Q7. Balance issues keep happening. Do you have a plan to address this?

We take the recent balance concerns very seriously. In some content and character releases, performance gaps became larger than intended, and we believe our balance verification process was not detailed enough.

To improve balance stability, we will make the following changes:

• Expand dedicated balance staff: We will add personnel and further specialize balance design and validation.
• Strengthen testing processes: We will break down internal testing into more stages and run both data-based simulations and hands-on gameplay testing.
• Extend verification time for new characters: Before release, we will increase balance testing time to more than double the current period to reduce unexpected performance swings.
• Continue narrowing gaps through buffs: Rather than primarily nerfing specific characters, we will focus on gradually buffing underused characters to widen viable options overall.

Balance is not something that can be perfected overnight, but we will continue improving it in a more stable and trustworthy direction.

Q8. Survivability is too difficult in high-score boss raid tiers.

In high-score boss raid tiers, the boss attack power scaling is being applied too aggressively, causing party survivability to become repeatedly unstable.

We want to keep the challenge, but the structure should still reward strategy and team composition. The following adjustments will be made:

• Reduce the boss attack scaling starting from the 3.0 billion score tier
• Lower the attack difficulty of certain raid bosses: Morrigan / Chimera / Esteria

These changes will ease extreme survivability pressure, reduce “forced” team comps, and allow more diverse party strategies.

Detailed numbers and implementation will be shared separately in the second February update notes.

Q9. Compared to the past, it feels like there’s a lack of communication about suggestions. Is there a reason?

Since before launch, I have tried to communicate directly through comments together with our CMs.

However, in many cases it took a long time for actual improvements to happen, and during that process, what we previously shared sometimes changed or went in a different direction than expected—leading to disappointment.

Because of that, we judged that sharing unconfirmed information in advance could create even more confusion and regret. So we adjusted our approach: we now collect all suggestions, deliver them to the development team, and then provide official guidance through developer notes once the improvement direction is clear.

Also, what I say can be taken as the official stance of the entire development team, so we have to be especially careful. Even so, we fully understand the frustration you may feel from reduced communication, and we believe this is something we must improve.

Both the CMs and the development team—including myself—continue to review your feedback consistently through Discord, Reddit, and Naver Cafe. We may not be able to reply to every comment immediately, but we internally prioritize and review repeated feedback and important issues.

We sincerely apologize for the frustration you may have felt while waiting, and we will work to earn your trust through faster and clearer official announcements.

Closing Words

Even during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday, we will work hard to prepare enjoyable events and the next content update so that Lost Sword can remain fun for you.

We hope all Swordbringers have a healthy and warm holiday season.

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