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.