KING of HOLO

KING of HOLO wears its licensing deal on its sleeve — 76 members of the Hololive VTuber talent agency, including graduates, all playable as tactical units, all promoted front and centre in the store page. That framing makes it easy to write the game off as pure fan merchandise. This review's research found something more interesting underneath: a shogi-based roguelike deckbuilder with a review base, however small, that keeps insisting the strategy game itself is the actual draw.

Shogi, rebuilt as a deckbuilder

Where chess starts both sides with a full army, shogi allows captured enemy pieces to be redeployed for the capturing side — and KING of HOLO leans directly into that idea by having every run start with an empty board and a pool of deployable units instead. One detailed reviewer described this as removing "a bunch of pawns in the way" and speeding the whole game up considerably, while also limiting the starting deployable zone to keep the opening from becoming a free-for-all. Layered on top of that shogi-derived core is a genuine deckbuilder: cards drawn from a Hololive-themed pool grant units, traps that trigger automatically each turn, and instant-effect magic spells, with the specific card pool changing every run. Reviewers describe the result as a tactical roguelike that successfully fuses strategy-RPG positioning, deckbuilding randomness, and turn-based board tactics into something with real depth — high praise for a game whose marketing leads entirely with its licensed cast.

You don't need to know the cast

The single most repeated point across this review's research, appearing independently in multiple reviews, is that KING of HOLO doesn't actually require any familiarity with Hololive to enjoy. One reviewer stated plainly that the VTuber branding "is merely an aesthetic and you do not need to have any knowledge of the cast to enjoy it," while another framed the appeal in almost the opposite direction — using a favourite Hololive member as the literal king piece and fighting the rest of the cast as an added layer of fun on top of mechanics that already work on their own. That's a notable, consistent claim for a game this openly built around licensed characters, and it's worth taking at face value given how specifically and independently different reviewers made the same point.

Built for newcomers to the genre, not just the license

KING of HOLO's own feature list backs up the accessibility angle from a different direction: adjustable difficulty lets players "challenge your limits, or relax and enjoy casually," and the game includes a guided tutorial explicitly aimed at players new to chess-like strategy games, not just new to shogi specifically. One reviewer noted the game is built in Wolf RPG Editor, a toolset more commonly associated with Japanese indie RPGs than strategy titles, and confirmed that despite that unusual choice of engine, the tactical systems come together as intended.

Rapid post-launch support, including new content

This review's research found KING of HOLO shipped on 15 April 2026 and received a burst of active post-launch attention: two bug-fix patches addressed a specific broken story event and an audio volume bug within the first ten days, and a third update on 23 April 2026 — barely a week after launch — added five entirely new playable character cards representing FLOW GLOW, one of Hololive's newer talent generations. That's a meaningfully fast content addition for a niche, low-priced release, and it suggests a developer actively paying attention to the game rather than shipping and moving on.

What this review couldn't independently confirm

Two honest limits on this review's research are worth stating plainly. First, KING of HOLO has no Steam Achievements implemented at all, which removes the usual independent, objective signal this review relies on to cross-check reviewer claims about content depth and completion time — there's simply no achievement-percentage data to check reviewer impressions against here. Second, only 5 of the game's 21 total Steam reviews are written in English; the broader 21-review sample sits at roughly 95% positive, which is consistent with what the readable English reviews describe, but this review can only vouch directly for the detail and substance of the smaller English-language slice it could actually read.

A genuinely large licensed roster

Whatever else is true about the strategy underneath, the scale of the licensing deal itself is worth stating plainly: KING of HOLO includes 76 Hololive members spanning the agency's Japanese, English, and Indonesian branches, its newer ReGLOSS and FLOW GLOW generations, staff characters, and even graduated talents who are no longer officially active under the Hololive banner. All 76 are playable and unlockable during normal play rather than gated behind paid add-ons — there's no in-app purchase layer on top of the base price, and the FLOW GLOW cards added three days after launch were a free update rather than paid content. For a licensed tie-in game, that's a notably generous scope: developers of officially branded fan-service titles often gate large portions of a cast behind DLC, and this review's research found no evidence of that pattern here.

Where it lands

KING of HOLO is a genuine curiosity that turns out to earn its praise on mechanical grounds rather than licensing alone: a shogi-based roguelike deckbuilder with real tactical depth, an accessible difficulty curve, and reviewers who independently confirm you don't need Hololive knowledge to get something out of it. Its review base is thin in English and it offers no achievement data to lean on, so this recommendation carries more uncertainty than most reviews on this site — but what evidence exists points consistently in one direction, and the price of entry is low enough that strategy fans curious about its shogi twist have little to lose.