Samurai Spirits Bushidouretsuden

"A good attempt at genre hopping"

Transferring video game characters from one genre to another is a tricky prospect. While Nintendo has made an art out of sticking Mario into every game type imaginable -I'm still waiting for the Super Mario dating simulator- most characters are often so closely associated with the genre they come from they can't be separated from it without losing what it is that made them interesting. With this reservation in mind, I tried out Samurai Spirits Bushidouretsuden, aka the SSRPG. Who would of guessed I would like the game?

It's certainly not the game engine that drew me in. Taking a page from RPG 101, a majority of the game features you guiding your party of three characters around mazes until you blunder into a random battle. [Hmm, it's obvious I'm a bit burned out on RPG's, isn't it?] What sets SSRPG apart is that you can align your characters weapons and defense to various elements [wind/fire/etc.], instead of magic you have special moves that you can choose to input via the motions similar to those found in a fighting game, and a rage gauge that builds up during the fight - think of the power gague from SamSho2 or the limit breaks found in later FF games
and you get the general idea. Trouble is, not a lot of this affects game play. As long as you keep your party varied in what they are aligned to [fire/wind/holy for example] you can be certain that one of you characters will be able to punch through the bad guys no matter what enemy alignment
you come across. While the special moves are great fun -they're flashy and you can use them to heal your party or dish out major pain to either a single enemy or a whole pack of opponents- I found most fights could be won using one of the basic attacks so I ended up hoarding my special moves either until I needed to heal my group or I ran up against a boss. Also, the novelty of inputting the commands for each special move wears off very quickly but, thankfully, there is an option just to pick the various special moves out of a list. When full the rage gauge will let your characters hit even harder or even unleash their super moves but your character has to get slapped around so much during a match for it to fill that it hardly ever comes into use.

The game is also a bit on the easy side. Using equal parts guesswork and on-line walkthroughs -my thanks to the people who wrote them- I've found I'm having no trouble with the game in spite of not being able to read any of the menus. I suspect this would be a major detriment if I could actually understand everything in the game, but this time out I'm grateful that the game is cutting me some slack.

The graphics are a mixed bag. Most of the outdoor and in-town graphics in SSRPG are serviceable, if nothing spectacular. The fight animation, however, is very nicely done. The player's characters behave like they do in the fighting games and the enemies are a varied and colorful bunch.

The sound, in comparison, is a stand-out. The music is well suited to the game, if a bit tinny sounding. SamSho has often featured music that is used to invoke the somewhat dodgy historical side of the series and SSRPG continues that tradition. While the music does a good job of setting the mood there's no one particular track that has stuck with me. Not only is most all the voice acting good, there's a stunning amount of it. Perhaps I picked a chatty group of characters but there's a great deal of speech peppered throughout the game which may not make the sections of plot development any more understandable for those of us who don't speak Japanese, it does make them a lot more interesting to listen to.

All things considered I've found SSRPG to be surprisingly fun. The fun of having familiar characters in an unfamiliar setting is doing a good job of keeping my interest. Being able to select your main character helps as well. Why should I play a RPG that forces me to have as some main character I've never heard of and may not necessarily like when I could play as Ukyo? There's also something to be said for a game that will let you have your favorite batch of fighting game characters team up for a common goal instead of having them constantly at each others throats. While taking a group of SamSho characters and having them fight their way through waves of enemies is exciting, taking the characters into town is a whole new experience. When was the last time you could take fighting game characters and have them chat with people on the street, wash up at the public baths, or go visit the local gambling or geisha houses? It's like Shenmue but on a less ambitious scale.

After seeing the successful melding of the fighting and RPG genres in SSRPG, it makes me wonder why SNK didn't try to branch their characters out into other games. Perhaps a side scroller Final Fight type game featuring the SamSho characters, or a puzzle game featuring cute little deformed versions of everyone's favorite samurai cheering you on as you correctly match different colored tiles together, or maybe even do something like license the characters out for a pachinko game. Okay, I'm being silly since SNK would never do that, right? Right?

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/18/01, Updated 07/18/01