Samurai Shodown

"Explosive samurai action."

This is the conversion of the Arcade game, I have also played the Arcade version many times, and I can say that as far as I have seen (and I guess I have played both version enough time), this version is exactly the same excepting for minor and irrelevant issues like zooms and that the characters are smaller in this one, at least that is what I have noticed.

Plot:
Yes there is a plot, pretty much like in any other fighting game, only that this time the bad guy is a bad sorceress called Amakusa. In the Tournament mode, after winning some battles she will appear and try to persuade your fighter with a lot of unintelligible no senses, no matter what you character will refuse, and that is going to piss her a lot, so she’ll swear to kill you. Of course aside from this little main plot each character has their own little ending.

Graphics 10/10:
Graphically Samurai Shodown is spectacular, its 32 megabytes of visual splendour. The scenarios are marvellous, full of little details and very beautiful, and the characters portraits showed at the ending or when a battle ends are magnificently done.

Music 5/10:
Each character’s scenario has its own musical track, and they are good, most of them have a nice feudal touch (Japanese style), but excepting for some I found them to be too similar, and not as powerful as needed for a game like this one.

There are some voices too, but excepting for the announcer that shouts the characters names at the beginning of each battle, it is hard to tell what are they saying, even the ones that speak English, I think there aren’t enough voices, the game could have been a bit better here, because even during the combats they hardly ever cry or say anything, or at least for me.

Gameplay 10/10:
Each character has two buttons to kick and another two to attack with weapons, they usually have four or five special attacks, and two ways of grabbing the enemy, we can also run if we want pressing quickly two times in the same direction. Their movements repertory is pretty nice, what I don’t like that much are the button combinations, they are like in Street Fighter, we have to use diagonals and so some of them are going to make you fingers bleed.

One of the main differences between this one and the rest of fighting game (at least for the Snes), is that here you fight with weapons, each character has its own weapon, most of them have swords, but we can also find chains, claws, spears, knives, etc. Sometimes we will loose our weapons, they can be easily obtained again, but we can continue fighting with our bare hands if we want.

At the bottom of the screen there is a bar, when it’s filled your character will become red and his or her attacks will do more damage. To fill the bar you characters will have to get hurt.

Aside from the Tournament mode and the two player option, there is another mode called Count Down, I have never played that mode for too long and I don’t know exactly what is the goal of it, but I guess it has something to do with beating opponents in a limited amount of time, don’t know exactly.

The cast of characters is wonderful, we have 12 fighters from the most distant regions of the world, all of them are very charismatic and their appearance is terrific, they are somehow typical, we have the big slow guy, a grotesque green beast, a quick but less strong young girl...but they all look awesome.

So:
I don’t like fighting games very much, the only ones that I used to play regularly were Mortal Kombat II and sometimes Street Fighter II, but when I got this game I remember having played a lot, so I think this one is at least as good as Street Fighter II. Don’t know why this game is not as popular in occident as it is in Japan, because it is a hundred of times better than most fighting games.

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/11/04