Samurai Shodown Sen
The way it goes with Samurai Shodown is fairly up and down. Something like this: It makes a really poor first impression with its presentation, then you think the setting and music are pretty snappy, but then you think it looks awful when you’re fighting. When you try to fight, you’ll think it’s pretty awkward, until you realise you can win a fight by decapitating your opponent. Then it’s awesome! But not for long…
To be more specific, the presentation and graphics of the game are quite poor: The fighting looks like an early PS2 attempt at realism. On the other hand, the character select screens, menus and loading screens are akin to looking at hand-drawn pictures through a mosquito-net (very bitty).
Completing the story mode for each character isn’t terribly compelling either, since each starts and ends with little more than scrolling text, the cut-scene at the end of the third fight is always the same, leaving only the brief dialogue before the penultimate and final fights as being unique to your chosen character.
There are a fair number of characters to choose from. A respectable 24 to be exact, with another two gained through multiple (joyless) story mode playthroughs. On the up side, these characters are nicely distinct from each other: We have a Joan of Arc type, a ninja, a guy who wants to be Zorro, a viking and a cowboy with a shotgun. Yeah, he’s a pain to fight. It should also be said, even the multiple characters wielding katanas do so using significantly different stances.
This is what makes the fighting itself such a shame. You could spend countless hours learning all of a character’s moves, but it’s much more effective to keep moving (given how painfully slow all the characters move) and time your jabs of the right trigger or bumper. It’s these blows that are powerful enough to ensure most fights end with a decapitation or dismemberment.
Such things become quite awkward when you’re faced with fighting young girls in their early teens. It feels downright uncomfortable to watch the head pop off a character that might as well be Japanese schoolgirl. That age old question often associated with violent video games comes up: Who needs this variety of catharsis? Won’t someone think of the children… With their heads still attached, hopefully.
This is probably an awkward moment to say that Samurai Shodown is not an experience entirely bereft of fun, there is a small window of happiness between starting out and realising it’s just too shallow. Unfortunately, that “small window” only lasts an hour or two.
Of course, the bigger problem is simply that Samurai Shodown was released rather neatly between Super Street Fighter IV and BlazBlue. Not only are they both better, they’re both cheaper.
