Way of the Samurai 2

"The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"

Blazing The Trail

The follow up to the original Way Of The Samurai finally rests in my hands. The original was quite the interesting game, while very low on the production-value side of things, I still feel it was worth my $17. Alas, the sequel has arrived, what excitement! The thought of running through a town with a brazen attitude and tearing up the place like the number one badass ronin, or perhaps my morale side will push me into uniting the town together and bring peace upon the land a la Yojimbo! Haha, we can do it! Made possible by the fine folks at Acquire. Picking upon the glut of trite "blade" comparisons that I'll undoubtedly use, how does the blade of Way Of The Samurai 2 hold up?

Pixilized Kurosawa

For those of you who are not familiar with Way Of The Samurai, the game is essentially a digital version of the infamous "Choose Your Own Adventure" books combined with the setting of the Akira Kurosawa movie, Yojimbo. You create a samurai avatar and use that as your player character. Upon talking to people, you pick from one of a certain number of responses that will affect the outcome of the game. You wander through a town fighting, talking to people, running errands, etc. The game is short, usually taking 1.5-5 hours each playthrough, but replay value is encouraged to get different endings through making different choices in conversation. In Way Of The Samurai 2, we come across the quaint Japanese town of Amahara, miles away from Edo (Tokyo). One would think this would be a rather peaceful and intimate town, but one is proven wrong. A bitter feud is going on! The Aoto Gang and the local Magistrate Office are essentially engaging in an old day variation of gang-warfare with the citizens being trapped in the middle. Enter you, the ronin. It is totally up to you on what you will do in Amahara, join the good, the bad, or the ugly...it's all up to you! Sounds great doesn't it? Haha, well, let's look into it a little deeper shall we?

Jagged Blade

Acquire isn't a hot-shot software superstar, and Way Of The Samurai 2 definitely shows that. With a rather conservative use of polygons and textures with jerky and stiff animation. Particle effects are minimalistic and several odd details that indicate slapdash workmanship are present; such as how the character models in the game cup their hands as if they're holding a sword hilt, sword lengths vary, and thus sometimes a character's lower hand is holding nothing but is still cupping it as if there's a sword hilt there. This may seem like a trifle complaint, however, the player sees many closeups of the characters in cutscenes and this particular detail is hard to miss. Other details that show general laziness are how the character models sometime don't animate when one would expect them to. In the beginning of the game, someone calls out to your character and he proceeds to turn around to see who it was. The problem with this is that Acquire forgot that humans cannot rotate their bodies without moving a muscle, which is exactly what the character model does. All in all, the game keeps it's head just above decent in the visual department. Another rather striking (in a negative way) aspect about the graphics is that the game only runs at 30 FPS (Frames Per Second). Very startling considering the first game ran at the full 60 FPS. And frankly, Way Of The Samurai 2 does not look terribly improved over it's predecessor, so it forces me to wonder why Acquire halved the framerate. Character design is passe at best, nothing that really sticks in my mind as memorable is present in the game. Art direction is also stuck at a rather mediocre level. Progressive Scan is not present either, though, that would probably not help at all with the visual presentation. A rather mundane job with the graphics, Acquire, please brush up the coding skills for the next game!

Misty Steel

The gameplay of Way Of The Samurai 2 is what I would call misty. Mist is very refreshing and cool, but it's very thin and light at the same time. Way Of The Samurai 2's gameplay is very refreshing in terms of context, but it ends up falling victim to the gimmick archetype. The "choose your destiny!" structure is not as deep as meets the eye, as can be seen from repeated plays, as you often end up having to run the same errands and doing similar jobs over again just to get a slightly different ending. It's cool initially, but it can get dull eventually, especially when you're on your 11th playthrough trying to attain more points to unlock the One-Hit-Kill mode. Another confounding problem with the game is the pacing. Many times you end up having nothing to do and thus, are forced to go back to your room and sleep some time away. Sure, you can spend time at the dojo and practice, or you can just randomly slash people, but those options get dull rather quickly. The game as a whole feels less involved than the first, which had you always on the move doing something important. There are many buildings present in Amahara, but many of them are the same pubs and shops. What really turned me off (and probably several others) is how you don't actually get to go inside these places, as soon as you enter one, you see a little "cutscene" of your character running up to the shop owner with the shop owner saying something like "Hello! What would you like to buy?" and then a list of items pops up. If you've earned a bad reputation, whenever you go inside a shop the shop owner will say something like "Somebody arrest this man!" and then your character runs out! This is absolutely ridiculous, it would've been far better if the player was allowed to roam around inside a shop or a restaurant and possibly attack the owners and the customers. The latter comment about the shop owners chasing you out of their shop has me flabbergasted, seeing as your character is the one with the sword, not the shop keeper. Very poor execution in that aspect of the game. The swordplay is one of the stronger points of the game, though it's still broken. Do not misinterpret me, you can potentially have a blast with the sword battles that occur in the game, their quick and seamless transition with the normal gameplay makes them easy to jump into. Alas, the swordplay is still broken, but I'll get to that later. Upon drawing your katana, you have the choice of linking combos with Horizontal and Vertical strikes. New moves are unlocked for each sword (of which there are like 60 of) by using them in combat. Swords are obtained off of dead foes and placed in a sword safe if they are to your liking. There are many different types of weapons in the game, some not even swords. There are 7 different sword types (high, center, low, side, one-handed, iajitsu, and twin blades) as well as other weapons such as hammers and claws. Pick which type you prefer, there's lots of them! So how is the gameplay broken you ask? Enter the parrying system of Way Of The Samurai 2. In an attempt to add some more depth to the combat, Acquire added a parrying feature so that you could leverage enemy attacks and strike them while they are off guard. The problem though is that they made it so that all enemies except for bosses die in one hit while they are off guard, rendering the game broken. And since the AI is quite poor, it can make battles ridiculously easy once you get the hang of parrying. The fact that the game runs at only 30 FPS is another problem, as it simply does not feel as responsive as the first game did. The gameplay is quite a shame really, as it's just overflowing with great potential. However, a sloppy implementation is at fault here, -1 Acquire.

Aurally Nervous

Noriyuki Asakura does a fine job here with the music composition, though, his work in Tenchu: Stealth Assassins remains his absolute best effort yet. The music is an interesting fusion of electric guitars, Indian sitars as well as Japanese flutes, drums, and some piano instrumentals. My eccentric taste in music helps me to enjoy it, however it's really nothing special after repeated hearing. Sound is on the lesser end of the quality spectrum. The sampling rate is quite low, resulting in the music sounding a little grainy. Dolby Pro Logic II is non-existent here, though I wonder if it would've helped much here. The voice acting is putrid, as the case with just about every Capcom published game. Japanese voice acting not only would be more fitting, but it would be easier on the ears as well, even if it was bad Japanese voice acting, it would still sound much better to us Yankee gamers. The voice acting is only present in the cutscenes though, the rest of the game features speech bubbles which are annoyingly written in all capital letters, with this are some grunts and short Japanese phrases like "Ara Ara" and the like. Some are repeated (such as the grunt the job broker utters in front of the Amakaze mansion) to the point where it'll sound either really stupid or really annoying. Asakura saves the sound aspect of Way Of The Samurai 2, good job man.

Parting With Destiny

The review rolls down into the conclusion here. Way Of The Samurai 2 is simply another case of something that could've been, but didn't. If Acquire pushed up the polish factor and perhaps took a closer look at the gameplay and the inherent limitations in the structure of the game, we'd have a superb underground hit on our grubby little hands. Though, maybe I'm being unfair to Acquire, as they're not a Konami type of establishment. Alas, one could only hope to see a Way Of The Samurai 3 with Acquire teaming up with a big guy like Konami for a much needed boost in the production values. $40 is a bit too much for Way Of The Samurai 2 right now, wait until it hits $20 before considering it, or rent it (provided your renter has it in stock, which is doubtful). I still enjoy the game, but it is still very very lacking in many departments. Definitely not a sharp blade, but yet, not quite a very dull one either.

A "slightly-above-average" blade

6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/19/04, Updated 07/26/04