Friday, April 02, 2010

Video game number eighty four: Samurai Showdown Sen

Video game review number eighty four in my 365 Games in 365 Days project is "Samurai Showdown Sen".

I have played a lot of different fighting games over the years. This one is certainly not the worst I've ever played, but it's definitely worse than any fighting game I can remember playing in recent history.

I'm pretty sure this is a port of a Japanese game, only the developers failed to do any localization whatsoever. I understand and respect the fact that there are people who LOVE importing video games, but I'm just not one of those people. I know there are folks who get all excited when some obscure title like this gets re-released in America, because they don't have to spend money buying the Japanese version of it. If this were a good game...I'd agree with them, but there are SO many better fighting games out there, I'm just not sure why anyone would ever want to play this one.

This game has decent graphics, but if I had to describe the combat system, it would probably involve the words "shitty" and "suck" in some form or another. It's not fun to play at all, and even when I figured out how to win matches, I can't say it felt satisfying.

There's a story mode, but it's all in Japanese. There is a Japanese narrator (no, they didn't even spring for an english voiceover), and if you're bored...you can take the characters through their quest. There is english text to tell you what is going on, but honestly...I really didn't care. I just wanted to fight.

There's a survival mode, which has a really weird sliding difficulty scale. The first ten enemies are cake, and suddenly, they get really difficult. This sort of defeated the purpose of trying to survive, because you could easily make it past the first few guys, and then suddenly..you'd get PWNED. In every other survival mode I've played, it's all about beating a lot of people with the same life bar, or multiple enemies at a time....but in this game, it's just "see if you can make it to number ten, who will kick your ass".

I went online to play a match...just to see if the multiplayer is any better. I met up with someone who sucked as badly as I did. That person managed to beat me anyway (I guess he sucked a little bit less), but at least I got an achievement for trying.

Overall? 2/10. It was a complete waste of time....but at least you could chop people in half at the end of the fight. That was kind of cool. Except when it happened to me. That was sad.

Achievements? I got two. Behold.

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