Seven Samurai 20XX

"Seven "Sins" of Gaming Conventions"

Let me start off by admitting to not only being unfamiliar with the Seven Samurai, but even worse, I have never seen a single one of Akira Kurosawa’s movies to begin with. As fate would have it, though, perhaps it’s better this way as judging by my own experience with Seven Samurai 20XX, fans of the “inspiration” would be even more disappointed by this tepid disaster. In fact, for a game that provides so little, it’s surprisingly difficult to characterize, really. Seven Samurai 20XX (hereafter just 20XX) is really a poorly designed product of other games: namely Capcom’s Devil May Cry 2 and Chaos Legion (only worse than both), sprinkled with Koei’s Sangoku Muso (Dynasty Warriors) or Crimson Sea, and topped off with a wannabe helping of Sega’s Shinobi and Kunoichi. The trouble is, though, that even though most of the games listed are bad enough to begin with, 20XX is even worse. Since the game makes use of the “seven” moniker, so too will my review:

Point I: Gameplay

Let’s start by examining the game play, since that is by far the most important part of this game, and yet sadly one of the most egregiously flawed. The player input can best be summed up with the instruction “push Square”. Do this for the entire game and you will complete it without a hitch. Seriously. 20XX *defines* the meaning of button mashing, and does so to such a degree that the player must begin to question whether Sammy even acknowledges the other three buttons on the controller, let alone the fact that human beings can do a bit more than swing a sword. Even worse, for a game that revolves entirely on button mashing, you'd really think that what miniscule content there is would be more interesting.

Well, let me be a bit more “accurate”; the game DOES use other buttons, though hardly at all. The only other relevant button in terms of the action is the “Triangle” button which blocks. Blocking itself, however, is a cumbersome chore based entirely on twitch reflexes rather than any kind of forward thinking. To block, players must hit “Triangle” right as they are being attacked. If the timing is off, you get hit. If you’re dead on, you block the attack. Of course if there is more than one monster attacking you, it becomes a problem as you need to hit Triangle AGAIN: unlike every other game in recent history, Sammy decided that blocking needed a separate “charge gauge” of its own. Each time you push Triangle, the block gauge will decrease a fixed amount, until it runs out. When the bar is empty, you then must wait for it to refill itself. I have never before came across a game whereby blocking is turned into an active impulse rather than a passive movement. Look at fighting games: blocking causes ALL attacks to cancel, NOT just the most current one.

Returning to the game play itself, 20XX tries to encapsulate any number of the modern gaming/cinema trends at the moment, including bullet-time, light speed dashing, instant kills, and more. Trouble is, the player can seemingly control none of them, and worse yet, the game dishes them out in a random fashion. Theoretically there are button combinations to initiate these attacks, however after completing the entire game, I never once discovered what they were, and even if I did, emulating the movements never proved effective. Really now, who gives a crap about these things unless the player can actually use them? Yeah, it’s cool to watch a bullet-time slo-mo attack where your character gracefully spins and slices, but it’s damn annoying to guess when and where he will do it. Dashing is equally flawed: either dashing in the wrong direction, or not dashing at all, the feature is a complete joke when compared to games like Shinobi or Bujingai.

The other battle ''innovation'' is the use of a dual sword mode, a “super” attack feature, so to speak. By pushing the “L1” and “R1” buttons simultaneously, you can initiate attacks which do twice the normal damage, and cover twice the normal area. Couple this with the random “ninja” features (dashing, bullet time, etc) and you could actually have a pretty good section of game play. Unfortunately this area is just as flawed, if not even more so, than the normal game play. For starters, there is no end to the use of dual-sword mode. The game allows you to use it whenever you want, however many times you want. The only hitch is that after the meter runs down (it starts at around 1 minute and 30 seconds of usage), you must wait until it recharges back up to 100%...a whole 20 seconds or so. Then, just initiate the feature again and plow through more enemies, recharge, repeat ad nausea. What trite garbage; I’m sorry, but exploitative features like this should be either limited in use, or require specific tasks to be met in order to use each time. How about consecutive kills actually doing something more than being tally for a combo counter; why not make that they energy to recharge the dual sword attack?. You can initiate a super attack frenzy whereby your attacks will massively overpower the opponents and generate large combos. In the end however, this converts itself into just more butting mashing of an even more intense degree.

20XX is divided into 10 chapters (11 technically, as there is a ‘prologue’), and at the end of each the player is treated to a “Biohazard completion” type listing of statistics. Everything from the number of times you attack, to your accuracy, to a pedometer reading, to even calories burned (?) appears for the player to muse over. Afterwords, the game will then upgrade your character’s status in up to three areas: the life bar, the guard bar, and attack power. The game claims to base this upon that area which you had the most trouble with in the chapter, though I would guess this is just bad use of English since the stat bonuses always appeared random. I hardly ever received attack bonuses, but always got life up (sometimes in excess of 10 units) even when I did get hit AND when I did not. The chapters themselves have a simple order: watch a 10 second FMV intro, go through an area, fight a boss (or bosses), go through another area, fight a chapter boss, then go onto the next.

When you are not in an area where the sole purpose is to fight, the game suddenly decides to become an RPG, or at least attempts this with the half-baked job everything else about it received: At key points in the game, you will be able to explore towns and speak with other people, all of which offer 2-4 lines of complaints, hopes, or anything else the writers thought to put in their mouths. These segments are just plain bizarre, and actually serve to weigh the game down with crap. So in other words, it’s OK for a pure action game to just stop all of a sudden, and instead offer 30 minutes of pointless running around? It’s so bad that you actually WANT to go back to the mindless button pushing.

That’s really all of the gameplay. You get the two swords that the hero starts the game with, and occasionally monsters will drop life refill stones. There are no items, no equipment, nothing in the slightest to add even the slightest bit of depth to this game. It is particularly disturbing that the game (via the status screen) actually lists every single weapon, though you can never equip them (or at least I never found out how to). It’s more of a database of monster weapons just to tantalize the player into thinking what kind of variety the game could have had.

Point II: Environment

If the battle system had been the only flawed part of this game’s equation, I would have been able to tolerate everything much more. Even the weakest of offerings can at times be redeeming if the other parts are all well crafted. Unfortunately, this is hardly the case with 20XX. Environments are passive, static displays that lack any kind of interactivity whatsoever. In each of the game’s 10 chapters, you will run through an impressive variety of locations, none of which you actually get to explore. The game works just like Final Fantasy X does: you can go where the game wants you to go. Unlike FFX though, there are no hidden items or such to be found and hence the only task for each area is to run through it as quickly as possible. No side paths, no hidden nooks to explore. Nothing, just a linear game which feels more forced than even Final Fantasy X did (hell, at least with the latter you could actually go back to revisit areas even if such was only at the very end of the game). The linearity takes an even sharper turn when one considers that 95% of the areas lock up once you enter them, meaning you can not go back (though in truth there is absolutely no reason to have to) and generally throughout the game, have essentially one exit to every room which creator Dimps thought it ‘sensible’ to make even more obvious by placing a huge green arrow to indicate such.

Now factor in the whole “RPG exploration” element I touched upon earlier. Can anyone reading this guess what the problem is? Aside from the fact that you can only speak to 1/3 of the NPCs around you, there is absolutely no function served in wandering around areas with such exquisite detail (as I never said the environments were bland *looking*) and your inability to do anything with them. You will watch as people weld machines, serve ramen, do more things than you ever though a game would waste time depicting (though not everything obviously…) and then just scratch your head in confusion as you wonder why so much effort went into such a lackluster format…

I will further this gripe by repeating that the environments are horribly, horribly static. No interaction AT ALL. This is just pathetic, truly pathetic. Bottles on the streets, pots lined up, signs, everything under the sun and yet it is all frozen solid to the area. There were Famicom titles that featured more in-depth environmental interaction than this title does. How is it that games like Shinobi, Kunoichi, and Bujingai have tons of breakable parts of the areas to them and yet 20XX does not? Come on now, it’s bad enough the game lacks any kind of depth to the battle system, why extend that to the locales as well? Why is it that Dimps spent so much time as to create realistic psychics with things like falling sand, and yet completely slacked off when it came to interacting with it? “Oh, the solution? Just make an invisible wall so that they can not touch it.”

Point III: Camera

Then we have the camera. Atrocious. I mean close to Sonic Heroes levels, that's how bad it is. If you can imagine the same camera used in Final Fantasy X (meaning fixed) and then apply it to a game whereby you must move extremely quickly, you get a real headache, as well as a real pain in the rear. You will often be hit off screen by the robotic monsters which serve as enemies and not even realize it. Most of the time, the game will allow a “manual swing” of the camera, as to call it anything else would be an overstatement. With the push of a button, the camera will swing around so as to center the action. Of course this only works if you are in a large enough area, and aside from that, the fact that the control is so dead-OFF means that the camera won’t even focus on what you want it to.

Point IV: Control

As one may have guess from my gripe in the last paragraph, the control is equally poor. Though not flat out terrible, there is so much left to be desired that it is just scary.
As if mashing on a button took any kind of skill, the game requires you to push all kinds of directional button combinations in order to perform different attacks. Perhaps this would be manageable if the digital pad actually worked, but instead the game will only accept input from the analog stick and hence button sequences are completely in the air. Aside from that, roughly half of the time in battle will be accompanied by numerous curses from the player (*especially* during Chapter 9) as their character mindlessly slashes at thin air while getting mauled in the back (I mentioned this earlier you may recall). Thus you must actually perform “efficient” button mashing, if that can even be called a process. This is one area that needed some real fine tuning, if not just plain feedback from the (apparently non existent) game testers. Really now, Japanese games are said to go through extensive amounts of play testing before their release; either that is apparently not true or else this game did not come from Japan. I might also add that pushing in the Right Analog stick opens up a map screen, though why such a linear game has one is beyond me. It’s worth mentioning that this feature becomes increasingly annoying as you progress, as in trying to mash the Square button fast enough and control with the Left Analog, you will inevitably push the Right and hence have to wait for the map screen to load, then cancel and wait for the game to load. (There is a LOT of loading in this game, by the way, every screen has about 30 seconds or so of a wait).

Point V: Audio

As you may gather, we are drawing closer and closer to Point VII, and as such the game can only be getting worse. Though it’s not exactly possible to understand just how bad the audio is in this game, I will do my best to try and convey it. Before we even get into details, let’s clear the floor right now: this extremely Japanese conceptual game (SAMURAI) does not feature much Japanese at all. In fact, 99.9% of the voice acting is in English, as is just about all of the text to boot. About the only thing NOT in English is the (non voiced) NPC chatter you get when talking to people optionally. Now, imagine if you will, a team of decent voice actors. These voice actors are much more talented than the hacks (at least I think so) who voiced say, Final Fantasy X and X-2. Now provide for them a script which reads like the Biohazard series, only worse. The voice acting in this game is SO poor, you will actually WANT to play the Biohazard series just to try and figure out why it was ever considered bad in the first place. This game’s script is so embarrassingly bad that you will consider muting the sound just so that no one else hears what you’re playing. Cheesy? This is like a Guiness Book of World Records sized ball of Cheez-Wiz. I’m fully convinced that whoever scripted this game had very little knowledge of the English language, and sought to allay any belief in this by making sporadic use of curse words (the very same ones I mentioned that you might utter from the gameplay/control issues). Funny thing is, though, that I’m not sure they even understood the Japanese language, either, as the Japanese subtitles are practically literal translations of the English! It’s as if Sammy thought that making the Guilty Gear series entitled them to be an authority on dialogue.

Musically, 20XX is somewhat more acceptable, though barely. The best music is the opening and ending theme, composed by veteran musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. (As one can imagine, the game makes NO small note of this talent). Unfortunately, for whatever reason Sakamoto did not compose everything else, and thus what we get is generic action game music. The tracks are so short that they will begin to repeat themselves before you even finish dispatching the legions of robots in each area.

Point VI: Story

*THE WORST* aspect of the ENTIRE game, by spades, diamonds, hearts, and clovers. It’s that bad. Actually, let me rephrase that; the story is not bad, it’s just non-existent, period. As you will recall, I have never seen the original movie which served as the “inspiration” for this game. My (therefore limited) understanding of such is that it is about a man who recruits six other samurai in order to save a village from a seemingly endless cycle of pillaging from bandits. 20XX fails to even accomplish this no-brained task. In fact, if there is any one area that can be blamed for the utter failure of this game, the award must go to the hack writers who “scripted” this disaster. Before I even elucidate on this, let me just attempt to give you a glance at the story, or at least what the game attempted to convey: In the year 20XX, an evil race of Humanoids has decided to take over the human world. They center their attacks on one village in particular and want to get a mute girl named Hinata. That’s it. In fact, I’ve completed the game now and even WITH spoiling it for you, the reader, could only add one or maybe two more sentences to describe the plot.

The fact is, plain and simple, that nothing in the game makes sense, at all. This is in no small way a result of the lack of any kind of background, explanation, developments, or anything else which seek to convey a fundamental series of events to the participant. Let me give a spoiler-free summary of the early parts of the game, just to explain this issue: Natto, the main character, randomly appears in a city under siege. He must help out trapped citizens from the crumbling decay and escape to safety. All clear so far. Unfortunately, this is where the game looses it. Enter the first boss character who attacks without any reason, and who leaves without any as well. Then jump to a scene whereby a random old man (whom Natto apparently knows though they player NEVER learns how, from where, or why) meets up with our hero though they do not get along. Now jump to the “plot”, so to speak, for no reason whatsoever, Natto suddenly must find six other people to help save the villagers. As with the old man, Natto knows some of these people, though we, the player, are never privy to find out how, why, or anything else about the situation. Factor in the inclusion of more random elements, this time in the form of “side stories” from the six “teammate’s” back stories. Unfortunately, without any kind of understanding of who they are, where they come from, or anything else, you could care less about them or their doings. Then, (once again randomly) the game suddenly becomes a “save the world” title, though the motive of the ultimate evil is never revealed, the concepts behind the plot are never brought forward, and the player finds themselves staring at the credits in utter disbelief that they’ve just spent roughly 5 hours playing a game that makes no sense at ALL. Point blank: Seven Samurai 20XX would have worked infinitely better had it consisted of nothing more than pointless fighting any NOTHING else.

I might add, by the way, that I have a very hard time believing that proper understanding of the game’s story depends on having seen the original movie. Unless “Seven Samurai” was a sci-fi movie which featured nonsensical antics and rampaging cyborgs, the ONLY elements this shares would be protecting a village. Parallel to this, the characters are all entirely new, and unless they are exact archetypes of the seven samurai in the movie of same name, it is just impossible to gather from where their backgrounds or anything else can be culled from. There is an entire chapter devoted to ‘theoretically’ exploring Natto’s background, though the game makes absolutely no understanding of it whatsoever, rather instead the fighting is all that matters. It is literally as if Sammy sent the game out for pressing before checking with Dimps to make sure it actually made sense. Never before in my life have a I played a game that had such an inane degree of random content and “exposition” as this one. Were 20XX to be Breath of Fire V (Dragon Quarter), then I would not have as big a gripe, as consecutive play throughs would reveal the daunting number of unexplained KEY ‘plot’ elements.

On a final note, I would just like to add that in the event screening the Seven Samurai movie before playing this will suddenly put everything into perspective (which is literally impossible though, since the game takes huge liberties with concepts no “period drama” would ever even touch), there is a simple fact that no respectable game actually requires 95% of the enjoyment to be derived from anecdotal knowledge. Even games like Final Fantasy X-2 provide for meaningful and understandable experiences for gamers who never touched its prequel. It is one thing for a sequel to have content which fans will pick up on, but it is quite another to actually design a product which bases its entire understanding on OFF screen information, information which apparently lies in a movie now half a century old. Again though, I stress that it is just impossible for this game to “make sense” if you are familiar with the inspiration it is based on and I would bet that anyone who has seen said movie would agree just the same.

Point VII: The Cast

For a game that makes no qualms about starring seven (key) cast members, you’d sure wonder where they are. Make no mistake about it, there are indeed seven samurai, but they are all “look” and no “touch”. You can NOT play as the other six characters; to rephrase this, you can ONLY play as Natto. That’s right, you only get to play the main character. Never mind the fact that you have a goliath sized muscleman/bouncer in your group who can run through solid walls and yet apparently can’t tap a robot. Nevermind the fact that you have a pint sized ‘hombre’ who packs a rocket launcher yet is apparently unable to load it. Never mind the fact that while you are part of a group of SEVEN skilled individuals, you don’t get to play as them, even for a single battle. This is just inexcusable. While I would understand if it the game did not allow unlimited use of character selection (as the samurai dart in and out of the story during the course of the game), there is no reason whatsoever that Natto is responsible for handling each and every single battle despite there being equally capable offense just itching to be tapped. What exactly is the purpose of these six other “samurai” if all they do is watch while the village they are suppose to be protecting gets attacked?

Epilogue:

I’m sorry, but this game just does not work, on any level. Thought it’s impossible to say for sure, I have a strong feeling that Akira Kurosawa himself would be shocked and saddened to see this mess, perhaps even more so because his grandson is involved in the project. I mean no disrespect by this, but what does his grandson know about directing and giving input with this kind of thing? Just because someone is heir to an estate does not intrinsically dictate they have absorbed the mind behind everything in it. Am I to believe that Walt Disney’s grandchildren should be looked at as creative influence just because their relative had so much talent? Disney, if anyone ever noticed, does NOT work this way, rather it has a giant collection of staff members who make the creative decisions and reduced Mr. Disney’s grandson (when he still worked for the company) to a “hands off” role. This is nothing more than a crappy licensing play for Sammy to cash in on. ''Oh look everyone! Someone related to the original property's creator actually is involved!''

And what is a samurai, anyway? I spent quite a few hours in the movie theater recently watching as Tom Cruise and (especially) Ken Watanabe, along with many other well respected actors, made me believe that the word ‘samurai’ has an unlimited amount of history, honor, and code behind it. 20XX throws the idea around as if it's some kind of mindless Japanese trend instead. Heck, after a short time the game phases out the word entirely and replaces it with the much less meaningful “hunter”, which ended up being a far better term anyway. The movie, ‘The Last Samurai’ is a beautifully crafted piece of art which depicts the sad but inevitable process that modernization has on even the most cherished old-world practices; the game Seven Samurai 20XX is a horribly convoluted amalgamation of everything it should not be and nothing it should.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/04, Updated 03/07/04