Katana Kami: A Way of the Samurai Story

released on Feb 19, 2020

The Way of the Samurai is forged in battle! Play as a ronin during Japan's Meiji Restoration in the volatile Rokkotsu Pass. The swordsmith Dojima falls into debt and his beautiful daughter is taken as collateral. Help repay the debt by crafting swords by day and exploring the mysterious, twisting dungeons of the Ipponmatsu Cave for valuable materials at night.


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I love The Way of the Samurai series and was very hyped for Katana Kami. Is a unique concept and try to do something new with the gameplay, going from a Beat-up hack and slash with Rogue like elements for a full Rogue Like. They really do well with the combat and every arena, is not so unique like the others game but works well. Some things are not really good to do like switch swords in mid play or run but is not that big problem. My biggest problem with the game is more the RPG side of the franchise. In every game you have a short story that you can finish in 10 minutes or go full 5 hours. There's a lot of options and you can role play in any way you want, but here is just two options and this is kinda sad. I really liked the game but not so much as Way of the Samurai 2 or the cowboy spin-off. Besides that, I really recommend the game

This is a wonderful game that is also the most irritating game I think I've ever played. There is so much good here, but it is so deeply ruined by some of the shoddiest programming and testing I've ever seen in my life, or at least in a game I wanted to love and spent a lot of time on. In fact, I don't believe that there was any industry standard testing done here at all. Just the programmers running a few scripts to make sure the game doesn't crash and that's about it. There is no way any human has even attempted to switch swords in this game, because even that extremely fundamental feature is broken and irritating.

To start with the good, this is an action roguelite with a heavy emphasis on the rogue and a japanese touch of hardcore game design. By that I mean that this is possibly the most roguelite game I've ever played, in that it is exactly a roguelike except the core loop is action-based instead of turn-based. You've got traps, unidentified items, a myriad of status effects, loot, random dungeons; this game has nearly the whole list of Berlin interpretation roguelike features. On top of that, it's possibly the deepest and most involved roguelite aside from The Binding of Isaac. This game has a loot system, a crafting system, a relationship system; it has three dungeons, a couple of hundred side quests and hundreds of weapons and items to collect. And nearly every NPC can be recruited as a dungeon buddy that you can level up, and you can even level up each individual sword both through crafting and gameplay. In addition that, the game is fun in how every character has a drop, including friendlies, because you can kill them and then they'll just magically be back (but angry at you) the next day. This means that, for example, your best buddy in the game has a unique weapon drop that you can only get from him and that's just fun. NPCs aren't real people and sometimes you get sick of their shit, and the fact that this game rewards you with unique loot for beating them up once in a while is amazing.

The sense of tension is also incredible for a roguelite, because you have permanent weapon upgrades and gear and after you've gotten deep into the game, your three best weapons will represent dozens of hours of grinding material and upgrading them and you do, of course, lose them all if you die. You can mitigate this by purchasing insurance and extra lives, so it's not as harsh as it sounds, but these resources are very limited and every death feels like a major failure and risk. You can find and obtain your gear if you can make it to that floor on the next life, but if you died deep in a dungeon, you're not likely to have any back-up weapons that are good enough to take you back there and then defeat your own ghost.

However, and this is a big however; all of that wonderful fun is ruined by horrendous coding and testing, because literally every single aspect of this game can and will glitch out on you. It's never game-breaking and the game functions in that it doesn't set your console on fire, but there are glitches of various sizes happening literally constantly. From minor things like HUD display errors or repeating sound loops to extremely serious things like how the game sometimes just doesn't let you attack. I don't know what happens outside of usually being able to fix it by sheathing and unsheathing my sword, but sometimes the attack buttons just stop working and that's obviously entirely unacceptable in a game like this. To make matters worse, there are also quite a few enemies that are just infuriatingly unfair and the floor is littered with traps that are too hard to see and just have annoying effects that piss you off rather than raising tension like they're meant to.

It really is too bad, because if this game had received any QA testing whatsoever and had a rebalance of some of the more awful enemy designs, it would've been an NBA Jam backboard shattering slam dunk of a roguelite and one of the top tier best of all time, but since this game didn't receive those luxuries and has now been abandoned by the developer, I have to sadly give this an average score and am forcing myself to give up on it long before I feel done with it because it's simply making me angry to play it now. To see all this wasted potential because some loser boss didn't want to greenlight a few more months of bug fixing is just sad and frustrating.