Absolutely fascinating concept for a fighting game. You would think boiling down a fighter to its bare minimum would result in an extremely dry game without much of a hook, but you'd be quite wrong. Because any blow can be the killing strike, matches build with tension as they go on, particularly when either side begins sustaining injuries. Easy to fall into the fallacy of thinking an opponent's down and out, only to be caught off-guard by a carefully-timed killstrike from a kneeling opponent.

Of particular note to me are the controls, for how much they visually communicate their own ideas. Lightweight placed extreme consideration for how to represent their fighters' actions, and this is reflected in the layout of buttons on the PlayStation controller. Immediately you have the attack buttons, △/○/X as High/Mid/Low Attack - a descending order matching the buttons themselves. The last face button, □, is used for parries, which is to the left. Looking at it from the perspective of a player on the screen's left - as Player 1 would be at the start - the defensive □ is in a position retreating from the enemy, while the offensive ○ is advancing towards the enemy.

We also see this level of thought placed into the R1 and R2 buttons, which respectively are used to elevate or lower the player. On their own, R1 shifts to a higher stance while R2 shifts to a lower stance. Movement plus R2 makes the fighter crouch, and hitting R2 while the player is crouching makes the fighter go even lower than a crouch and fling dirt. Movement plus R1 lets the player climb a wall, and R1 out of a crouch turns the motion into a leap forward. There's a lot of very careful psychology like this to what the buttons do, and it's this sort of meticulous, deliberate design ethos that permiates a lot of what Bushido Blade is as an experience.

Bushido Blade feels a bit like a tech demo with all its offerings. Its emphasis on realistic weapon simulation, as well as mixing and matching eight weapons with six player characters, is pretty cool, and the game's main hook. Slash Mode is a fun challenge, very much a nod to traditional swordfighter movies. POV Mode is a complete gimmick, but darn if it isn't a cute idea. Link Mode is a cool idea - not a lot of games would make use of the ability to hook up multiple PS1s - but I've never had any Player 2s, so I can't vouch for it.

So, the hook for me has always been Bushido Blade's campaign. The initial draw there is how the game enforces its understanding of Bushido code - strike an opponent dishonorably (while they're talking, while they're vulnerable, etc), and the story admonishes the player with a bad ending. I'm always fascinated when a game bakes its moral code into its game systems, particularly if it's an established real-world code rather than the simple good/evil binary. But the campaign is quite short - potentially only six fights, in a game where every strike is a killing blow - and the endings are all melancholy and don't seem to resolve anything, so there's sort of an empty feeling a player has walking away from it.

...until they realize that there's a puzzle to finding the good ending. I don't mind spoiling it here: first, the player must navigate through the game world, screen by screen, as they look for their exit. Second, the player must clear every fight without sustaining damage. I guess, because each strike is a killing blow, the usual "don't lose a round" approach to a fighting game's true ending is an unrealistic approach?

I spent a couple hours on-stream trying to grind out a good ending, and while I was ultimately unsuccessful, I came away really appreciating the challenge being asked of the player here. That thing about tension building over the course of a match? That gets amplified considerably here, both during the first round escape sequence - even once you have the path memorized, a three-to-five minute run with an aggressive opponent constantly on the player's heels - then in the subsequent six fights. It's weirdly Katze, the first boss character who weilds a firearm, who becomes a breather round - striking, because he's initially the most annoying of the game's bosses for his ability to insta-kill at range. Everything else, including the normal, non-boss characters? Could stop your attempt cold.

There's sort of a weird meditative quality to grinding out the good ending, given that first round escape sequence. There's no music, just the noises of the wintry background as the player makes their escape. Once you solve the puzzle, the player's left alone with the empty nothingness of their flight, of everything being stripped away besides the instruments of death. I know I'm making a broad, sweeping statement on a culture with which I've barely interfaced, but I dunno - it feels like there's something quintessentially Japanese to this experience. Not bad for a game designed after kids beating sticks against each other on the playground.

An extremely experimental and thus interesting game,although one that I enjoy thinking about more than I do playing. Not only is the concept of stripping down most elements of a fighting game down to a one-hit kill system extremely avant-garde, but the story mode is full of other oddities, such as being set in a massive map that you can run around in and explore at will mid-fight (while the other guy chases you around everywhere) and a weird "honor" system that dictates your ending based on your actions.

I think it's only fun for a couple of hours if you're not playing with friends, but I'd still recommend it.