Samurai Shodown: Sen

I'm a card-carrying lover of fighting games—especially 2D fighters. I love Soulcalibur as much as the next gamer, but it just never really seems like anyone can create a 3D fighter that's as smooth or responsive as the top tier 2D fighting games. Most of them suffer from over-juggling, cheap combos, unintuitive controls, and what feels like a tacked on strafing mechanic that is really the only thing that makes it 3D.

With that out of the way, let's get down to talking about Samurai Shodown: Sen specifically: it is not a good game. It's frustrating on more levels than any game should be and looks and feels like a regular Xbox game or an arcade game from 5 years ago.

Strike One: the Controls and the Third Dimension

The controls are sluggish at best. Being able to move quickly to, from, or around the opponent is a task. Characters like Draco start to make it literally impossible, but I'll get to that in a minute. I found myself ducking rapidly like an idiot when I was trying to sidestep towards the camera and doing that stupid half-jump that's been a staple of 3D games since their beginning when I try to move away from the camera.

This becomes especially frustrating when fighting characters who are good at-range or the ones with rush attacks.

Strike Two: it Doesn't Look Good (or Sound Good)

No. It really doesn't. Hair is in super-large chunks that only moves half the time. The environments in which you fight look like they're well-intentioned but are full of what looks like 32-bit sprites and a complete lack of interaction and dynamic. The only thing that redeems the way the game looks is the occasional fatality in which you slice off some part of someone. Too bad while this is going on the only sounds you hear are the thud of them hitting the ground—no screaming, no blood fountain sounds, nothing that sounds like you just sliced some dude's arm off.

Strike Three: Unbalanced Characters

Time to talk about A vs B and C vs D. Most of the main characters are balanced as well as any 3D fighter. In other words, there seems to be tiers of characters and one always has an advantage. I'm talking about characters like Cervantes. With that said, the story mode isn't terribly difficult until you get to Draco and Golba. The two bosses are so overpowered that I almost have trouble believing that someone would approve them as part of a production game. Cervantes' warping is bad enough, Draco is a completely different story. To be honest, I think that they might play on the highest difficulty regardless of your difficulty settings—which would be fine if it was an arcade game; how else would they get ma' quarters?

Sub-boss: Draco

This guy. This-fucking-guy. You could really begin and end any negative review of this character with the fact that he uses a rifle and can fire it in succession without any delay. Meaning he has no trouble pushing you to the other side of the ring with one shot and then juggling you with what seems like one million shots in-a-row. He also has a grab in which he gets in close and fires his Winchester into your face from underneath your chin. Guess what. It takes like 40% of your health. Guess what else! You can't block these gun shots.

The only strategy I found that worked was staying close and sidestepping around him (when it doesn't result in ducking like an idiot) and hoping to land blows. Even after fighting him on my 24th time through story mode (for the "beat with everyone achievement"), it took 5 or more frustrating deaths to get past him. Then, sometimes, he just lets you have your way with him—inconsistency is good in games, in my experience.

Main Boss: Golba

Nowhere near as frustrating as Draco, but still completely over-powered. Not really much to say here, he looks stupid and is annoyingly difficult. Until he, like mentioned above, bends over to take it.

Bonus Strike: Engrish

The lack of "Victoly" upset me at first. Then I saw the list of achievements and met an entirely new reason to laugh at bad Japanese ports. They're all pretty bad, but just to highlight one: "Kill thousand of men—50G—To kill thousand of men (in any mode)".The translate/port team couldn't even get title case right. The big stupid Viking guy is called "North Sea Unsinkable Ship" while the slightly more racist Native American is "Noble warrior on the earth".

Also—this isn't really a translation thing as much as it's just kind of offensive—the Viking is a big clumsy, stupid version of Asteroth and all American characters play in the same ridiculous looking theme-park wild west town with the same laughable wild west saloon song played on what sounds like the little music boxes sold in Cracker Barrels around Christmas.

Conclusion

Don't play it. I'm not as big into SNK fighters as I am Capcom, but I have played Samurai Shodown enough to have a few favorite characters and have played enough of the past games to know what I like from the series. The game frankly just doesn't work and disappointed me. Even if someone had told me that it was just a bad Soulcalibur clone, I still would've been disappointed.