Samurai Shodown (Game Gear) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Takara's 1994 versus fighting game for the Sega Game Gear, Samurai Shodown

Played through as Haohmaru on the default difficulty level.

Samurai Shodown, for those who somehow aren't in the know, was a groundbreaking fighter when SNK first released it for the Neo Geo MVS and AES systems back in 1993. It was one of the first good weapons-based fighters, and it veered pretty sharply from the Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter game play molds. Rather than asking you to pull off special moves as fast as humanly possible, Samurai Shodown was a much slower, much more intense game. Rushing in is a good way of getting your torso cut in half in SS - to seriously play it, you have to be careful with your timing and make the few strikes you attack with count. You can easily end a match in 4 well-timed, full-force swings if you're careful - if you try to slam them with special moves and weak attacks again and again, it'll either take you forever to whittle down the opponent's health, or you'll get slaughtered. It was also pretty famous for the ludicrously bad translation, as were most SNK games (though Samurai Shodown 2 is the holy grail of SNK's Engrish attempts).

Anyways, with that primer out of the way, you might be wondering, "They made this for the Game Gear?" Apparently they did. It's not as if Samurai Shodown was shy about showing its goods around town - it got ported to the Game Boy, SNES, Genesis, NeoGeo CD, NG Pocket Color, Sega CD, 3DO, FM Towns, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some other one. But yeah, it was put on EVERYTHING. And in a rare stroke of luck, they are were at least reasonably good! If you'd like to see some of the other versions, I've posted links to some playthroughs in the card links.

The Game Gear version is very much included in that last statement. By the system's standards, it's an impressive piece of work, and pretty comparable in quality to Takara's other Game Gear fighting game port, Fatal Fury Special.

The level of detail is pretty impressive in the sprites and the backgrounds, even if the poor LCD screen and garish color palette choices leaving it look fairly muddy at times, are surprisingly close to the ones used in the arcade. The animation is, as you'd expect, fairly limited, but most of the basic animations are here in scaled-down form, as are the great majority of the attacks and special moves. To compensate for the GG's lack of buttons, one is dedicated to punch, one is kick, and pressing them at the same time does the slash. Pretty simple and easy to use - just like the system that Neo Geo games often used. The sound is... present, I guess. The music is all there, but the great majority of it is awful and not worth listening to. The voice samples are also all missing, but that is to be expected on the Game Gear.

The game play fares quite well. I will say that the Game Boy version is faster, smoother, and has all 12 characters present (the GG version trimmed the roster a bit), but the Game Gear looks much closer to the arcade game than the redrawn chibi-style graphics on the Game Boy did. They both play well, and I certainly prefer this one's presentation - most of the cutscenes are included, as is all of the original dialogue - and it's SNK's original translation!

If I had to chose which portable Samurai Shodown to go with back in 1994, I probably would have picked the Game Gear version for the graphics alone. It looks great, and it plays well. However, the more sensible, adult me in 2017 would pick the Game Boy version. Stylized graphics aside, it's a much smoother, more polished experience.

That being said, neither disappoint. At least, they didn't disappoint me.

Recorded with the Retroarch Game Gear LCD shader.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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