Samurai Shodown

-SNK/dbi (2004)

-played on a Sanyo 8200

Summary:

Tiny, unresponsive fighting dishonors samurai everywhere.

My Thoughts:

Samurai Shodown was a popular fighting series at one time, with its exciting, fast paced action, slick animation, and defined 2D swordplay. You will find nothing of what made Samurai Shodown great back then in this version. The controls are highly unresponsive as the samurai may or may not do a move when a button is pressed. Special moves are available, but pulling them off is too difficult. Even moving is a chore. It consists of constantly having to tap forward or back keys while the characters take miniscule steps to your desired location. All the moves are explained and demonstrated in the Temple, the instructional portion of the game. Since the game is unbearable and nearly unplayable, watching the Temple is better than playing the game itself. The two fighting modes are Story and Survival, which are pretty self-explanatory.  

There are only four characters: Haohmaru, Nakoruru, Gen-An, and Charlotte. In Story mode you can’t even choose the fighters, you have to first fight as Haohmaru then another fighter and so on until you complete each fighter’s tale. Each character fights the other fighters and then his evil player 2 version. But, it’s not over yet. In order to artificially lengthen the game, the fighters must duel the “player 2” colored versions of each fighter. 

When the fighters in the regular game were moving away from one another, the game zoomed out so they could go where they wanted in the arena. On the mobile version, the camera is always zoomed out, so the samurai are very small on the already small phone screen. For what its worth, the graphics actually look pretty good which is not enough to save this butchered version of a fantastic game. They may be tiny samurai, but at least the once honorable fighters still resemble their better arcade and console counterparts. By the mountain Gods, this game sucks.

Score: 2.0

-Shawn       

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