Samurai Western

The "Way of the Samurai" is believing in your sword and... Ah, give me a break...

review by:Dragon_Zork

Everyone knows that samurai lived in the East and cowboys lived in the West, so what is a samurai doing in the cowboy territory? Well, Gojiro Kiryuu, a samurai from Asia and the main character of the game, has made his way to the United States (which the title implies) with a purpose. His trip was not for sight seeing or to create a new life, but instead to track down his brother, Raddo. Raddo has ditched the way of the samurai, his country, and, most importantly, his sword after losing in a duel to Goldberg, a wealthy landowner from the West. Since then, Raddo has touted a gun and worked under Goldberg as the man’s muscle. The moment he walks into the ghost town, where Goldberg and his brother both reside, Gojiro is assaulted by bandits. Gojiro’s reply is to pull out his sword and start swinging, which is actually quite effective.

As you progress through the sixteen missions you learn a little more about the plot. The idea of placing a sword-wielding badass in the middle of the West sounds like a good idea on paper. I mean, guns versus swords are always cool. Sadly, this potentially good idea doesn’t remain so when transferred from paper to disk. This is mainly due to the large amount of plot holes that plague the game. Gojiro will be forced to fight boss characters as he fights his way through the levels. This is normal. However, instead of explaining who the characters are and what their purpose is, the game just skips all that. This is also normal, for a crappy game. The bosses will just show up, sometimes at the start of the level and sometimes at the end, and you will be forced to fight them without explanation. There are some pretty bizarre boss characters, like one “faceless man”. The boss shows up while Gojiro and Raddo are feuding, and doing so in quite the cool fashion. He repeats words, orders his men to kill Gojiro (repeating the word kill three times, too), and then, in the end, Gojiro kills him. That’s all you get, an intro and a death. No background information whatsoever. You don’t learn much about Gojiro, why Raddo and Goldberg fought, or even how Goldberg obtained all the power he has. These plot holes, along with an uninspired brotherly feud, will lead you to not even care what happens to Gojiro, Raddo, Goldberg, or even the black Frenchman, who enjoys dressing like Napoleon, with a huge chain gun for a weapon (I’m not joking).

Just because a game has a bad story doesn’t mean it can’t be good. Take Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, for example. The story in Third Age wasn’t at all as epic as its counterpart (the normal Lord of the Rings, if you’re not using your brain at the moment), but it was still entertaining and a pretty good game. So, just because Samurai Western’s story is worse than an elementary school play’s doesn’t mean it has to go in the junk pile. No, rather, the crappy gameplay is what makes Samurai Western belong in the junk pile.

That’s not so say that the game should go without a little praise, as it does a few things right here and there (As do must junk pile games). The controls are easy to master, making it so anyone can really jump right in and start hacking away. The only buttons you really need to use are the square button, which allows you to swing your sword, and the O-button, which makes Gojiro dodge or deflect bullets. Though it will happen rarely, you might also need to use the triangle button (To pick up objects) and the X-button (which makes Gojiro jump), but in my whole time playing this I rarely pressed either. The X-button will also make you roll after being knocked down, in order to keep from being in a vulnerable position on the ground, but you have to time it perfectly. As you slice your way through your enemies, your MP bar will begin to fill. Once it is all the way full you can press L1 to trigger a special attack mode. While in this mode, enemies will all be decapitated with one slice. It’s bloody, it’s stylish, and it’s cool. You can also go into a special attack mode when the bar is ¼ full, or somewhere in between that and completely full. However, it really isn’t the same (Enemies don’t die in one swipe; you’re just faster and more powerful).

After this, though, Acquire must have noticed they still had three shoulder buttons but nothing to do with them, so they just threw in random things. Pressing the R1 button will dodge/deflect bullets (which, those observant enough will have noticed, the O-button already does). If you press L2 the whole game will change, as you will now be fighting in first-person. While slicing people apart in a view that makes it look like you are actually doing it sounds cool, it really isn’t. Moving around becomes difficult, it becomes more obvious how bad the graphics are (as you see them up close now), and hitting an enemy turns into a challenge. Finally, the R2 button doesn’t do anything. Instead of making it target enemies, returning the camera to a good position, or, say, block, Acquire just decided to leave it doing nothing. Despite this, the controls still remain easy and uncomplicated. So, if you can go on ignoring these three buttons, the controls won’t upset you too much.

Having different weapons in the game is a nice touch, as well. While being able to fight with a different sword other than the one you start out with doesn’t sound like much, the fact that each one comes with a slightly separate style is definitely a nice touch. I, personally, collected nine different swords (though swords are rewarded for high scores, so there might be more I didn’t get) and discovered four different styles among them. Obviously, this means some swords use the same styles, but they even have tiny differences between them. The four different styled swords are the high-stance swords, which allow you to knock your enemies off their feet; the duel-wielding swords, which will give protect you from getting knocked down by enemies (though you won’t be able to pick up items to shield yourself); the low-stance swords, which are the best at deflecting bullets; and the sheathed-stance swords (My personal favorite, mainly because you look extremely badass), which are the most powerful but are, in turn, unable to deflect bullets.

Sadly, other than the variety in the weapons, there isn’t much else to like about the game. First of all, a big problem I had with Samurai Western was the difficulty. That is to say, there is no difficulty. You are given the option of two difficulties at the start (once you beat the game you unlock the “hard” difficulty level), but the enemies never put up much of a challenge on any level. From shooting walls you are on the other side of to shooting their own teammates that are standing in between them and you, it seemed like they didn’t even care. I really don’t blame them for not caring, though; they are, after all, lackeys that will die in three hits from your sword (while it takes them a good deal of bullets to finally bring you down).

Battles basically progress like this: enemies appear, you kill them, enemies appear behind you and take some cheap shots, you kill them, and then repeat. Sometimes the enemies that appear will be ones that throw dynamite or bombs which can cause some serious damage if you didn’t know they were there (but chances are that, after the first few levels, you will have adjusting to the back and forth appearance of enemies). A targeting system or a better camera would certainly have helped, but there is no targeting system and the camera wants you to die (and it will move to an area where no enemy is to do so).

The bosses aren’t much better than their lackeys, either. For one, some bosses won’t leave their spawn areas, giving you the ability to run away and kill some lesser enemies in hopes of finding some health pickups. What’s worse is that they all have one long range attack, one close-up attack, and one counter-attack. Once you learn what each one of these is, you can easily figure out a way to defeat the boss. An even simpler way to beat them is to save your special attack mode for the boss fight, use it on the boss, and basically take off all of his life (As you don’t take damage in the mode).

To beat the mission you must fulfill your objective, which is either to kill the boss or to kill all the bad guys. Once the mission ends you are graded on your performance in five areas. The areas are: play time (how long it took you to beat the level), number of kills, max combo, max kill combo (How many people did you kill in your special mode), and the amount of damage your received. You are also given a bonus if you were never knocked down. The whole grading thing resembles the old arcade games, as you are given a high score to try and beat. This gives the game some replay value, if you find it fun to go back and try beating all the high scores.

The real reason to aim for a high score, other than for bragging rights, is to get accessory items. Every item will change your stats a little bit. For instance, the cowboy hat adds ten to your life and minuses five from your strength, while the throwing star adds six to your defense. The different accessories are all cool, as the range from a huge throwing star to a parrot that rests on your shoulder. There are five different areas that things can be equipped on (the head, waist, chest, right leg, and left leg), but you can only have one thing equipped on each. While this is a cool addition at first (I mean, who doesn’t love having a monkey as an accessory), you will begin to notice that some of the items don’t, well, work. Take the afro, for instance. It makes your once cool character into a complete buffoon. No samurai has an afro! Also, some of the hats don’t look right because Gojiro’s hair will go through them, and sometimes other body parts will go through other items, which just make your character, as a whole, look ridiculous (Samurais don’t have afros!).

After each mission you are given a little bit of experience to raise your stats and level. You have four stats to improve with the experience points you earn. You can raise your life, MP (For the special attack mode), power, or defense, all of which do what you might expect them to do. So, if you want an extremely strong character, replaying through missions will help you (though it isn’t needed due to the lack of difficulty).

One of the biggest issues I had with the game was the length. As I already mentioned, there are only 16 missions in the game. Needless to say, Samurai Western is quite short. It’ll take you only a few short hours to beat the game, and that is if you can play through the game without getting tired of it. What’s worse is that, even though there are 16 missions, they all take place in one of the six different areas. Basically, Acquire took one of the levels, changed where the enemies appear, and called it a new level. For instance, three of the missions take place in the exact same saloon, though in the third time you play the mission there are more enemies!

One of the nice things about having so few missions is that you won’t have to look at the sub-par graphics once you beat the game. At first, I thought the style was just unique. As I went along, I figured out that it was just shoddy. Body parts will go through accessories, things lying around the map, or anything else. Characters look bland and un-detailed, and you will be forced to fight through waves of inbred enemies whose blood comes out of their body even their shirt remains untouched. One of my biggest problems with the graphics was the fact that character’s mouths don’t move along with the voices. A lot of games don’t have mouths moving exactly with the voice, but in Samurai Western the mouths usually move ten seconds after the character starts talking. It’s like a horribly dubbed Japanese movie. The environments are even as bland and hard to look at as the characters. The only good thing I can say about the graphics is that they don’t burn your eyes out.

The audio isn’t any better, sadly, making the game, as a whole, barely sub-par. The voice acting, for one, in the game is just horrible. While there is one character that has ok voice acting (the voice actor that actually delivered was also the voice of Spike, on Cowboy Bebop), every other character is all but unbearable. Gojiro himself is voiced by two actors, one who speaks in English and one who speaks in Japanese. Apparently, Gojiro is undecided on what language he wants to speak, because he switches between the two languages as the game, and even the first mission, progresses. The one positive thing I can say about the audio is that, at the start, the music is good. However, after hearing the same song repeated throughout every single mission, even it, one of the few good things, gets old.

If you can manage to make your way through all of these problems you are rewarded with a few extra missions (as if you would actually want to play more of the same levels), a survivor mode, and the ability to play co-op with a friend. None of these things really made me want to play the game anymore, though, and having to make your way through the whole thing to get them might not be worth it to some.

When it comes down to it, Samurai Western is yet another samurai-based catastrophe. The game introduced nothing new to the table, and did everything wrong. The game might be entertaining at the start, but once you complete the first three missions you’ll be able to see what the game really is. It’s just a complete waste of time and money. Let this one float its way down to the bargain bin, boys and girls, and then, even if you really are desperate for a samurai fix, continue ignoring it until it goes away completely.

The Score:
Gameplay: 5/10
Graphics: 4/10
Audio: 5/10
Worth: 4/10
Overall: 4/10

+ The voice actor who voiced Spike, in Cowboy Bebop, makes an appearance
+ The disk makes good Frisbee
- The disk is not very durable, making it a good Frisbee for a short time
- Everything
? Why must Samurai be disgraced so?

Looks fun huh? Boy are you wrong!