#861

A playthrough of the final boss Golba in SNK’s Samurai Shodown Edge of Destiny/Samurai Shodown Sen.

Samurai Shodown Sen. There are black sheep games, and then there’s this. I have no clue why this game was made. It is a shoddy, irrelevant title which is barely based on the series it claims to be a part of. The gameplay is slow, broken and monotonous. The game has far too many characters (26 in total), including many which are just ridiculous stereotypes, such as the Afro Samurai J and even a bleedin’ Viking of all things. Sen seems to almost be a sort of spiritual successor to Sam Sho 64 and 64-2, yet somehow manages to be worse than it in every way conceivable.

Sen was originally released on the Taito Type X board, and then ported eventually to the Xbox 360. You may notice two issues with that statement. One, for a Taito Type X game it looks absolutely horrible. I mean, simply horrific. The character models have terrible lighting, they look incredibly bland and often featureless, the levels are drab and dull, and in general it comes across as a game which they ran out of budget for, and eventually just had to shove out in the state it was in. Or, it was made simply to fund KOFXII and XIII, which might actually hold some credence now that I think about it. The other part of that statement is that, well, this game was ported to the 360. Of all things. A console which outright failed in the East, and which was more or less wholly Western in focus. When you think of Japanese-exclusives or Japanese-centric games, they usually came out on the PS3, understandably. Here however, Sen for some reason or another got a release on the 360. Maybe it was just cheaper than porting it to the PS3? I honestly don’t know.

Then we come to the gameplay. It is awful. It doesn’t know what it wants to be in the slightest. The game obviously, vaguely wants to be Soul Calibur, but it’s far too stiff and cumbersome to be a game in that series. Simultaneously, it wants to have combos and aerial combos…while also often making it so that heavy attacks do the exact same amount of damage (if not more) than the best combo a character can execute. The game features four buttons; a vertical slash, a horizontal slash, a kick and a throw button. Yeah, a separate button for throws. I’ll get into that later. So, that of course means that you block by moving away from your opponent, like a 2D fighter. However, for a cumbersome fighting game like this it just barely works. The manual blocking of the SoulCalibur series works because you need to be able to instantly go into a block in a game which is that fast-paced. Here however, after executing an attack (or series of attacks), the character is left vulnerable and is unable to block, simply because they’re temporarily unable to move backwards. And because they can’t do that, they can’t block, leading you to feel completely out of control of your character every time you attack. In a 2D fighter, you’d be able to recover quick enough after an attack to then block again, unless the opponent outright countered you. Here however, the game enacts an inane practice where side-stepping is incredibly stiff, basically leading to a situation where you have heavy, 3D mechanics on a more or less 2D plane, leading to a series of trivial and tedious blocks by your opponent, until one of you finds an opening or falls for a heavy slash. Which is surprisingly common.

So, you have a game which has absolutely no clue what it wants to be. Not quite a 3D fighter, but not quite 2D. Not quite combo-focussed, but not quite strike-based like the classic Sam Sho games. It’s a bizarre, unsatisfying myriad which is only compounded by the fact that so much of it is an anomaly for the series. Tons of new, stereotypical characters who have never appeared since, with back-stories you don’t care about and a story which makes literally no sense. And, oh, you might notice something else. This is one of the blandest fighting games in existence. It’s far, far too real, especially for Samurai Shodown of all things. It tries to ground itself in reality when it comes to gameplay, removing most of the supernatural special moves and elements like that. However, said illusion is failed when you end up fighting an 11th century Viking, amongst other ridiculous characters who look like they were based on the costumes they could find in their local fancy dress shop.

[continued in a pinned comment]