Samurai Gojiro Kiryuu comes to the American West in search of his brother. His journey takes him to a corrupt town ruled by a sinister land baron named Goldberg. Though Gojiro isn't interested in righting wrongs, he is soon caught up in the town's problems: killing highway robbers, protecting a woman from would-be rapists, and thwarting Goldberg's machinations. Focused on destroying Gojiro, Goldberg unleashes an endless stream of minions... all fodder for Gojiro's blade. But Goldberg has an ace up his sleeve... Samurai Western is a third-person action game. Gojiro's blade is more than a match for Old West weaponry as he can ably deflect or sidestep bullets. As Gojiro completes levels, he upgrades his skills, unlocks new swords and stances, and adds Western accessories to his wardrobe. Primarily a single-player game, Samurai Western has a two player co-op mode and unlockable characters for both modes.
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I've always been a fanboy for Acquire's samurai and ninja games, particularly Way of the Samurai, and I remember liking this back in the day but not beating it... considering this is basically a WotS spin-off, I had to fix it. Now I know, it's the worst game in the WotS series, for sure!
Basically, this game overstays its welcome despite being like 3-4 hours long. Every stage (except literally 3 out of 16 main stages) are basically the same damn fucking thing: just mash Square while sometimes dodging with Circle until you kill enough enemies for the game to arbitrarily say you beat the stage. Not to mention that you will be repeating the same areas multiple times anyway!
Gameplay just gets old after a few stages, despite the game giving you new weapons. You see basically all enemy types after a few stages, with the exception of bosses (which mostly are annoying). Camera sucks, too.
Using Ultimate Master Mode never gets old, tho, since you become invicible, fast as fuck, and can instantly kill mooks goring them. I'm assuming this was an inspiration in a way for some stuff in WotS3 and WotS4.
Story is entertaining. Obviously don't expect too much, but it's entertaining for what it is. It's nice to see Dona Dona (Donald), though I can't tell if this is an alternate reality type thing or if this is set before WotS1? I don't know the timeline but this feels like it's set after WotS1's time, despite Donald's entire existence here implying this is before WotS1. I had no internet when I played the game so I couldn't look up dates, which is when I wrote this review too.
Anyway, gameplay is neat for the first 30 minutes then you already saw everything there is to offer, so the game sucks ass. Story, style, and soundtrack are what carried it enough to make me wanna beat it. Also Claudia's massive low-poly tits, goddamn!
Basically, this game overstays its welcome despite being like 3-4 hours long. Every stage (except literally 3 out of 16 main stages) are basically the same damn fucking thing: just mash Square while sometimes dodging with Circle until you kill enough enemies for the game to arbitrarily say you beat the stage. Not to mention that you will be repeating the same areas multiple times anyway!
Gameplay just gets old after a few stages, despite the game giving you new weapons. You see basically all enemy types after a few stages, with the exception of bosses (which mostly are annoying). Camera sucks, too.
Using Ultimate Master Mode never gets old, tho, since you become invicible, fast as fuck, and can instantly kill mooks goring them. I'm assuming this was an inspiration in a way for some stuff in WotS3 and WotS4.
Story is entertaining. Obviously don't expect too much, but it's entertaining for what it is. It's nice to see Dona Dona (Donald), though I can't tell if this is an alternate reality type thing or if this is set before WotS1? I don't know the timeline but this feels like it's set after WotS1's time, despite Donald's entire existence here implying this is before WotS1. I had no internet when I played the game so I couldn't look up dates, which is when I wrote this review too.
Anyway, gameplay is neat for the first 30 minutes then you already saw everything there is to offer, so the game sucks ass. Story, style, and soundtrack are what carried it enough to make me wanna beat it. Also Claudia's massive low-poly tits, goddamn!
This review contains spoilers
Based on the game's aesthetic and presentation, I desperately want to love this game. However, this is severely brought down by its glaring issues. It starts strong but falls off a cliff after the first boss. Most bosses are annoying and the game throws too many enemies for you to realistically deal with. Stage objectives are a bit confusing since enemies constantly respawn, so most stages just eventually end after killing a random amount of enemies. Overall, worth checking out for a few stages but not good enough to justify completion. Don't do what I did and brute force though it.
fun game, janky japanese gameplay. would be nice if it was shorter though
Eu sinceramente gostei do jogo, por mais que seja repetitivo e afins, não é a pior coisa já feita.
A câmera as vezes é um lixo porque ela fica entrando dentro do cenário e ela mexe pro lado q você movimenta para os lados, mas da pra mexer a câmera pelo outro analógico também e não fica de todo ruim.
O combate do jogo é meio travado, como se você dar um ataque no ar seu boneco fica travado e não mexe por um tempo, isso atrapalha MUITO porque você começa a levar muito dano por nada.
As primeiras fases tem momentos que as cutscenes começam do nada, não que seja algo muito ruim mas sei lá, me incomodou um pouco.
Por fim a temática do jogo é muito boa e designs dos bosses me agradaram bastante.
A câmera as vezes é um lixo porque ela fica entrando dentro do cenário e ela mexe pro lado q você movimenta para os lados, mas da pra mexer a câmera pelo outro analógico também e não fica de todo ruim.
O combate do jogo é meio travado, como se você dar um ataque no ar seu boneco fica travado e não mexe por um tempo, isso atrapalha MUITO porque você começa a levar muito dano por nada.
As primeiras fases tem momentos que as cutscenes começam do nada, não que seja algo muito ruim mas sei lá, me incomodou um pouco.
Por fim a temática do jogo é muito boa e designs dos bosses me agradaram bastante.
Samurai Western's style is a perfect blend of rule of cool anime from the early late 90s to 2000s and the many PS2 era action games.
Sadly that style has to carry a pretty poor camera, horrible boss fights and some terrible mission objectives that boil down to killing hundreds of the same 3 types of enemy every single time.
HOLD UP THEY LET YOU PLAY AS DONALD?????
Sadly that style has to carry a pretty poor camera, horrible boss fights and some terrible mission objectives that boil down to killing hundreds of the same 3 types of enemy every single time.
HOLD UP THEY LET YOU PLAY AS DONALD?????
There's some surprising nuances to Samurai Western's design- enemy attacks are all signaled by a voice line and a change in their mini-map appearance, letting you react to them even if they're off-screen, and there's a good level of quality to the overall feel of the experience: dodging around automatic gunfire feels great and combat while simple is generally satisfying. I say all of this is surprising because, despite the fact that this is the third game in a series, from a developer that already had four games' worth of experience under their belt and would go on to make many more even today, Samurai Western has the very distinct feeling of a mid-tier PS2 kusoge hack and slash, usually the sort developed by a very obscure company that'd go on to die out sooner or later. The environments are overall pretty ugly, some of the mechanics aren't well thought-out, and generally it feels very, very cheap.
The biggest thing that stands out when playing Samurai Western is that it doesn't really have levels proper. Instead, you have some large arena, where enemies continue to respawn, and killing enough of them eventually clears the level. There's some exceptions but most of the game goes like that. This isn't as awful as it seems, these games after all ride or die on their combat mechanics and to push everything else away in its favor might not be the worst idea ever, but it does make the game very, very repetitive. Still, it feels good to play, if you don't burn yourself out. Despite somewhat poorly thought out abilities (every sword class has its own "devil trigger" but they're all bad in comparison to the universal one you get if your bar is 100% full) and limited movesets, killing guys feels good and, unless you get stunlocked (pro tip, hit the jump button as you're falling to immediately get back up), it all works, it's just kinda the only thing you'll be doing for most of the game. There's a scoring system, and it's mean enough that on your first playthrough you'll be getting a few scores in the negatives, which i found pretty funny.
What does put a spoke in the wheels of Samurai Western are the bosses- some are exceptions but almost all of them see the boss backed up by infinitely respawning goons, which leads to you taking some pretty cheap hits. Doesn't help that most of these bosses are fought after minutes and minutes of killing enemies, so if you die you have to do all that again. I eventually just put up save states before all boss battles, it just wasn't fun to deal with. So overall, Samurai Western is repetitive, rough around the edges but not necessarily unfun, just sorta alright. I don't know if I'd recommend it, but if you're interested there could be worse ways to waste your time, I guess.
There's a story, but I don't really think it's worth dwelling on. What might be are some of the neater little details this game has. For example, while the game is in English, the MC and his brother are voiced by Japanese VAs, and when speaking to themselves or one another they will do so in Japanese. The game lets you turn on extra challenges for the sake of extra score when replaying stages, which is cool though I don't SW is strong enough to warrant more than a single playthrough. It's also neat how the multiplayer lets you play as a supporting character, even though that means I have no clue what he actually plays like. I really dig how you can move around and resize clothing items though, lets you give Gojiro a big ass hat, or if you prefer, position any item in such a way that it somewhat resembles a large phallus, which is really what videogames are all about, in the end. Also, the main villain (who's voiced by Paul Eiding, same VA as Roy Campbell from Metal Gear)'s weapon is called Scissor61, which I thought was a cute reference that most people would never learn of, given the game's obscurity and the requirements for unlocking it. That's all I got.
The biggest thing that stands out when playing Samurai Western is that it doesn't really have levels proper. Instead, you have some large arena, where enemies continue to respawn, and killing enough of them eventually clears the level. There's some exceptions but most of the game goes like that. This isn't as awful as it seems, these games after all ride or die on their combat mechanics and to push everything else away in its favor might not be the worst idea ever, but it does make the game very, very repetitive. Still, it feels good to play, if you don't burn yourself out. Despite somewhat poorly thought out abilities (every sword class has its own "devil trigger" but they're all bad in comparison to the universal one you get if your bar is 100% full) and limited movesets, killing guys feels good and, unless you get stunlocked (pro tip, hit the jump button as you're falling to immediately get back up), it all works, it's just kinda the only thing you'll be doing for most of the game. There's a scoring system, and it's mean enough that on your first playthrough you'll be getting a few scores in the negatives, which i found pretty funny.
What does put a spoke in the wheels of Samurai Western are the bosses- some are exceptions but almost all of them see the boss backed up by infinitely respawning goons, which leads to you taking some pretty cheap hits. Doesn't help that most of these bosses are fought after minutes and minutes of killing enemies, so if you die you have to do all that again. I eventually just put up save states before all boss battles, it just wasn't fun to deal with. So overall, Samurai Western is repetitive, rough around the edges but not necessarily unfun, just sorta alright. I don't know if I'd recommend it, but if you're interested there could be worse ways to waste your time, I guess.
There's a story, but I don't really think it's worth dwelling on. What might be are some of the neater little details this game has. For example, while the game is in English, the MC and his brother are voiced by Japanese VAs, and when speaking to themselves or one another they will do so in Japanese. The game lets you turn on extra challenges for the sake of extra score when replaying stages, which is cool though I don't SW is strong enough to warrant more than a single playthrough. It's also neat how the multiplayer lets you play as a supporting character, even though that means I have no clue what he actually plays like. I really dig how you can move around and resize clothing items though, lets you give Gojiro a big ass hat, or if you prefer, position any item in such a way that it somewhat resembles a large phallus, which is really what videogames are all about, in the end. Also, the main villain (who's voiced by Paul Eiding, same VA as Roy Campbell from Metal Gear)'s weapon is called Scissor61, which I thought was a cute reference that most people would never learn of, given the game's obscurity and the requirements for unlocking it. That's all I got.