Seven Samurai 20XX

"Spawning Ennui Faster than a Katana Cutting Water"

Sometimes I wonder if programmers have gone out of their way to make certain games boring and disengaging to play. Everything seems so seamlessly constructed to make the gamer fall asleep at the controller that they couldn't have possibly intended for it to be exciting. It can be crafted with beauty, given smooth controls, fluid animation, lucid sound, and yet still it feels more appropriate for curing insomnia than for entertaining. There aren't many games like that out there. Most of them feel as though no semblance of effort went into their manufacture and thus they are outright awful. However, every once in a while a rare “gem” comes along that obviously had a great deal of work put into it and yet it still falls drastically short of inspiring. Seven Samurai 20XX is one of those kinds of games.

I'll guide you through the start of the game, just so you get a basic flavor of what it is like. We start with the loading. It takes a while for anything to load. About 45 seconds to a minute to get from level to level, and even between some sections of levels. There's loading before the game begins as well. We begin with a scene of our character, Natto the swordsman, running about in a city under siege. We don't know why he's here or what he's supposed to be doing, but it's okay. It ought to be explained later on down the line. After a short while we are thrown into the first boss battle. The boss leaps down at you and attacks for no good reason. Some boring techno-esque music starts up, and it is at this point you proceed to discover how obnoxious and bland the controls are.

You have very limited functions in this game. All you can do is “dash” (which is more of an over-glorified hop), block, and slash at stuff. The dashing is okay for avoiding a single large attack, but in general it is fairly jerky and occasionally annoying to time. Most of the time it isn't even needed any ways. The blocking mechanism is odd. You can't just hold down the block button. You must hit the block button just as the enemy is striking at you in order to block. This goes for every single hit thrown your way. So if you have three enemies attacking in front of you at roughly the same time, you're going to have to mash that block button at just the right exact times in order to avoid damage. Or you could just dash backwards and away, whatever works. This could be an interesting concept, but the problem is that many of the grunt enemies have very slow, awkward looking attack animations. Half the time you can just dash away, or even walk away as they attempt to get a blow in. Mixing this together with a few fast animations and it ultimately becomes too much of a bother. You just dash away or constantly remain on the move because it is so much simpler.

Then comes slashing with the almighty square button. I hope you like that square button, because you're going to be slapping that sucker an awful lot. I'll be frank with you, I don't mind games with repetitive game play. I liked Final Fight. I liked Streets of Rage. I liked the PS2 Shinobi games. I hated Seven Samurai 20XX's gameplay. With those games the other buttons got some hitting, or you actually had to attempt to manage the severity of your hacking and slashing. With Seven Samurai 20XX there is nothing but blindingly hitting the square button as far as attacking goes. There are special features. There is bullet time, there are instant kills, and a few other snazzy features, but for some reason the game just doesn't want to explain to you how to do them. Never within the time that I played could I figure out how to initiate these things. They seemed to be randomly activated by random direction motions followed by mashing square at the right time, or certain number of times. You'd think you could eventually learn how to do them by trial and error, but it never comes off cleanly. It is always more effective to mash the controller in random directions and hit square than attempt to study and learn these features. It's nice that they have them and all, but if it isn't any less effective to learn how to work them, and if the game isn't going to give you any hints at all on how to use them, then how useful can they really be?

There is one easy to use feature to make killing easier. It involves building up this meter by slashing at enemies. Once it fills up you can… get this… pull out another sword! Now when you mash square repeatedly you do even more flurries of attacks and you have to attack even faster than before! Oh joyous joy! The fun doesn't end there, folks. This “special” ability takes roughly 30 seconds to a minute to charge up once you burn up all your energy, and then you can use it again. Really, it's that fast and easy. It also seems to defeat the purpose of it being “special” since there is hardly a time when you'll be playing that you won't have it available, or not have activated it already. And all it leads to is hitting the square button faster and harder than before.

So you go and beat this extremely simple boss battle with these controls. It wasn't too bad, right? The battle wasn't that long, you had full view of the arena, and you've just started to fiddle with the controls, so it'll probably get better over time. You then talk to some old guy who seems to know who you are, though you never know how, and you have little clue as to what they are talking about. Queue to hoards of grunt enemies showing up. It is now that the evil camera rears its malignant maw along with its accursed brother, the world environment.

Outside of “boss” or “duel” type battles, you will be traveling through maps not too different from those in FFX. They are extremely and annoyingly linear in nature. Everything is designed in exacting and intricate detail, from the rust on the walls to the steam rising from random vents on the floor, but it is all background. There is no interactivity with the environment. In fact, you usually can't even run around free roam. As soon as you enter another open space, all the entrances and exits will seal, and you will be flooded with dozens of grunts. Then when you slay them all, usually one or two doors will be open to access again. If there is more than one, they will usually take you to the exact same spot next irregardless of which route you select. All the while you will hear this irritating buzzing in the background that remotely resembles music. Sometimes it even will sound half decent, but for the most part it is a loop of dull droning. I digress, though. The real issue here is that when you're zipping around slashing clunky idiotic looking robots into smithereens, the camera remains fixed. You have no control over it. It may randomly zoom around you or choose to remain stuck in place at any given time. Likely an inopportune time, as the game seems to fondly do this to you every two minutes or so. Perhaps it was done to try to increase the challenge of beating back the hoards of dimwitted droids with the almighty square button, but I only found it frustrating.

While speaking of the plethora of cloned peons you will be dicing to bits, I will now mention that even the weakest of them take about five to six hits to defeat. Now, in the first areas of the game, I don't think these fellows attack you in groups any smaller than forty. It only grows as time goes on, with an assortment of other clunky mechanical grunts to come on later down the line, most of them taking longer to whittle down and none providing too much more of a challenge. This just gives you a vague idea of much you really need to work your thumb in order to progress in this game. Actually, scratch that. I can give you a solid idea. At the end of each “chapter” of the game, it ranks up random statistics and all sorts of stuff you don't care about for your personal viewing. Well, would you look at that, you hit the square button a few thousand times during Chapter 1. Looks like you burned several calories too… wait, this thing records how many calories you've burning by hitting that infernal square button? Why in the world did they bother adding in this feature when the camera and gameplay so obviously require more work?

From there the plot, or the closest thing to resembling a plot, begins to unfold. Natto has to go out and look for six other people to help save the people in the city. From there you meet the rest of the cast, learn scant bits of information about them, or learn that your character already knows them (thus you learn nothing) and then they proceed to become wallpaper. The story then digresses into some sort of save the world kind of thing, though the game doesn't make the transition very well. All we know is that it's the doing of those bad robot people you've been slicing to ribbons since the beginning of the game and a group of folks called humanoids. The player is never given any indications as to why these things are a threat. We have no idea why they are the bad guys. They just are. In short, the story is just an array of scenes inbetween periods gratuitous slaughter that merely befuddles and annoys the player, and actually makes them want to return to pounding away at their controller like a deranged monkey. Seriously, if this game had no story at all and just threw you from one battle ground to another, it might be a slightly better game. Unfortunately, however, you must sit through dozens of nonsensical and mind numbing cut scenes involving the activities of characters you don't care about because you don't really know anything about them any ways. Even when the game attempts to explore the main character's past (or at least I think it did), the ultimate result was that the player understood nothing and ended up hacking a few hundred more grunts into pieces.

What we have here is a piece of plastic with the potential to vex most any gamer's soul. The gameplay couldn't feasibly be more repetitive or nauseatingly boring. The enemies are slow, stupid, and usually not a threat even when you're being mobbed by them. The music is either irritating or negligible. The story is half baked at best, and the game would be better off if it simply didn't have one. However, the controls aren't a complete mess, and it is a very pretty game. Well, as pretty a game as you are going to get for one depicting a derelict city in the future for the entirety of its course. The characters have a goofy sort of look to them, their clothing being reminiscent to what is seen in The Bouncer and Kingdom Hearts. Some people may be put off completely by this, but I found it mildly appealing. All in all though, there's nothing here to warrant spending good money on a purchase. Or even a rental. Please, unless you are really desperate for a new game, love button mashing, and have played almost every other action game out for PS2, consider looking else where. It's just not worth forcing so many of your brain cells to commit seppuku.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 06/29/04