Way of the Samurai

"This Game Can Either Be Very Boring Or Very Fun"

Way of the Samurai was one game that I really wanted to like. After a few months of searching, I found it lying on a video game store's shelf one day. I then got kind of excited. I took it home and popped it in my PS2. For the next 30 minutes while the game loaded, I just sat there while being amazed at the load times, which occur every five seconds.

The controls are good. They are set up almost exactly like the Dynasty Warriors series. You have a main attack and an alternate attack and some jumping moves. You have a button to change the person that you are locked-on to, block, and a few more things. Every so often you can earn combos in the game for a particular sword. Well, the combos rarely work if at all. The controls get unresponsive when trying to use them. Overall, the controls are set up well, but can be unresponsive at times.

The gameplay isn't that good, but it was a great idea. You start off at the main menu and can either start the story mode or go to a tutorial. The tutorial teaches you useless things for over 30 minutes that you could easily learn in one minute of play time. I suggest to go straight to the game. Well, here we are. Now, you can pick your character's name, look, and weapon. After that, another long ass load screen. We are now at a semi-tutorial that teaches you how to pick up items, jump, attack, and move. Now, these are pretty basic things, but the game somehow finds a way to turn these basic things into something that the developers thought was advanced or something. I mean, the damn thing takes over 20 minutes to do because of the constant loading and stopping and waiting and etcetera.

When you actually get into the gameplay, it is fairly easy on one hand, and fairly hard on the other. The easy part is the actual game. The hard part is not taking the game out of your PlayStation2 and throwing it at the wall like a frisbee. Needless to say, it can be very frustrating. You can play this game any way you want to. There is a system where you can ''talk'' to people (read the sound section for the reason for the quotations) by pressing Circle near them. This is how you choose your path that you want to go in the game really. You just do what you want to do and go where the people say to go.

Since you are a samurai, there is a lot of fighting in the game. You will be fighting super humans that can get slashed with a sword 30 times and not even lose half of their health bar. Anyway, you can pack 3 swords with you at a time and pick up swords off of dead bodies. Each sword has it's own move list in a way. For example, if you pick a sword off of some guy with one style of fighting, you will have his style. There are a few different styles along with a few different swords. You can also improve your sword by upgrading it's durability and sharpness. Swords can also break during fights, which sucks to the extreme. When it does happen, you just have half a blade that does no damage. You will then have to sheathe your sword, be hit by more people, and then get a new sword out. Takes too long really.

Anyway, the fighting is very good. When you swing your sword at someone, they can block it by swinging their sword at you at the same time or by holding their sword up in defense. You can also overpower people when using the first way in the previous sentence, which will cause them to go backwards or stumble forward. If you get behind someone, you can do a lot of damage to them. Something I like about the game is when you are taking on around 3 guys and are locked-on to one, the others usually won't attack you. This could be a turn off for some, but it is really realistic in a way. After a while, your swords can also break, which is very annoying.

The level designs are great, but you can't really appreciate them because they are so small and take so long to load. I mean, every 30 seconds, you will see a 15 minute load time. They are really that bad. Anyway, the levels are like big open fields and cities and crap. They are all very cool looking and stuff.

The replayability isn't good at all. All you can do is play the game over and over and over and suffer through the same long load times over and over and over, which you will most likely not want to ever do. Well, there is also a Versus mode, but it gets really old and really fast. Overall, the replayability is bad and the gameplay isn't too good either.

The story progresses as you go through the game. You basically make the story yourself, considering you make all of the decisions and the game doesn't do it for you. The story can end up really good or really bad, which will depend on your decisions that you make in the game.

The graphics are stunning. Everything looks vibrant and everything, but there is a flaw. The load times. Like I have complained about a lot in this review, the graphics are the main reason that the load times are so long. I would rather be playing an ugly game with shorter load times than this. The sound is good, but there is one huge flaw. There is absolutely no voice acting in the game at all. You will only hear characters say expressions like ''Ah!'' and ''Oooh!''. Words pop up on the screen like they would in a comic book. It is extremely aggravating.

To buy or to rent? I would say rent this if you are a hardcore samurai fan. If not, I wouldn't bother.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/02/03, Updated 04/02/03