Sengoku Basara 2 HD - Sasuke Sarutobi | Story Mode

This is going up on Christmas day, which has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas. But, uh, merry Christmas I guess.

Sasuke is returning from SB1 with his usual moveset and Basara. His S-string is a bit awkward but it functions and his Basara is really solid for damage and range. His specials are all of the place, some being great, others being dudes. His first one is a dash move where he closes the distance, which would be great, if he didn't paused to twirl his yo-yos and ruin his combo in the process. Second is a sweeping attack that pulls enemies in from behind, which helps to enable his other attacks. I got another special move that turns him invisible and drops aggro from him but that's almost completely pointless. His most stand out special I unlocked is a counter that you can spam liberally. What happens is that when Sasuke is hit while you are pressing Triangle, you still take the hit, but Sasuke teleports above and drops down on top of the enemy for decent damage. It prevents a lot of damage when you would otherwise be hit by the full combo of an attack.

Sasuke's 1st stage is an alternate version of Odawara, where you sneak into the castle. Poorly. Enemies are alerted almost immediately and Ujimasa runs off the second you approach him, forcing you to fight the Power Rangers and more enemy officers that appear. Once you approach the big gate, Kotaro Fuma will appear.

Kotaro is interesting in that he can potentially only appear in this stage if you never screw up the gate closing mission in the normal version of Odawara. Man, he really is the best ninja. It took 19 playthroughs before I even SAW this guy. Kotaro is kind of shafted in this game however, because he isn't playable and is just a clone of Sasuke's moveset. He has I think one unique attack and he summons a bunch of shadow clones of himself during the battle, which can be difficult to contend with as they respawn endlessly. They disappear with one hit though so you can keep the pressure off by being aggressive. Then we just need to defeat Ujimasa to end the stage.

2nd stage is Xavi's stage. Kasuga joins us as a bodyguard halfway through...then leaves as soon as we go to fight Xavi.

3rd stage is Kyoto, where now we have Kasuga with us for the whole thing.

4th stage is another new one. We fight Matsu and Toshiie here and it has a similar gimmick to their SB1 stage. After you fight them for a while at the beginning, they run away down opposite paths. Whenever they meet up, they'll heal each other and the surrounding allies, then go back to making laps around the map again. I managed to defeat one of them before they met up at all, which got me the bonus for the stage and prevent a lot of healing. Matsu and Toshiie will also flip-flop between aggroing to you and ignoring you entirely in favor of running around the map, so chasing them down can be a bit of a pain. Fortunately there are shortcuts you can take on the map.

5th stage is a semi-unique version of Honnoji. It's basically the same as regular Honnoji, except Kasuga is behind fighting enemies until you lower Nobunaga's health. Then she appears to help you fight him. I rather liked this ninja duo story they had going on here. Frankly, Sasuke is a much more interesting fit with Kasuga than Kenshin is.