Hey, guys!
Okay, so it’s no secret that I love samurai. That said, it’s easy to assume that I’m a fan of most things featuring samurai in one form or another. From the classics like The Seven Samurai to some more obscure things like the Onimusha series. If it’s got samurai in it, chances are I’ll give it a chance. So, in that respect, when I got a whiff of the Way of the Samurai series several years ago—I think a little over 4 years now…maybe more—it’s obvious I was excited.
Here was a game that allowed me to take on the role of a wayward Ronin—masterless samurai—and choose to help the people of a village in need of a hero or take over the gang of bandits and reek havoc on the dingy citizens as I saw fit…or I could simply pass the village by and legitimately end the game in 10 seconds. I, being the paragon that I am when it comes to gaming, always choose to help those in need. And, from that point forward it was an amazing romp through the fictional life of a Ronin. I loved it.
So, when it was announced that WotS3 was on its way, I was stoked. It was one of the highest games on my list of “must haves” for October this year. But, sadly, as the game’s release drew nearer and more reviews were surfacing, the edge on the sword that was my fervor began to dull. It seemed that this latest installment in an otherwise inspired series was somewhat lacking. All the key elements were there, but the meat was a little on the lean side. After reading the last average scored review, I decided that I’d throw it on my GameFly list and wait to play it when I got around to it.
Well, last week I received the notice that the game was on its way and, low and behold, my excitement shot right back up to its original zest. I was pumped.
Then it showed up.
And I put it in the Xbox…
And was sorely disappointed.
It’s not that the game is totally horrible. It’s just that I can’t seem to figure out how to find the parts that aren’t. First off, let me tell you that, should you choose to play this game, you need to speak to a minstrel (the little old dudes with the string instrument—Biwa—found in every major area) and get him to play a song. This isn’t really made readily apparent at first and, thus, I found myself creating my character from scratch on three separate occasions. That is to say, three times from not saving; if you die, you can load from a previous save or start over with any experience, yen and weapons accrued in your previous playthrough.
As for the game itself, there are definitely a lot of great ideas here. The core concept of the game—the reason I was drawn to the series—is present but, for me at least, felt more like an inspiration than an actual element of the gameplay. From what I could tell there is little in the way of story to be found and what snippets I did experience, were few and far between and made little to no sense to me. When you start the game, your character awakens—after a brief cutscene where you pass out in front of a couple of battlefield looters—in a small home in a village. When you exit the home you are greeted by a mean old man (presumably the owner of the home) and can actually accidentally skip the whole encounter and not be able to go back, thus having no idea what the hell is going on—not that the encounter really gives you much to go on in the first place.
The accidental skipping involves a system in which every major conversation can be interrupted by one of two choices: throwing yourself to the ground and groveling or drawing your weapon. The former usually has you kneel like an idiot and then get up and walk away, completely skipping the conversation and erasing any chance of repeating it. The latter…well…you can imagine what might happen there. This is a cool system in theory, but with no explanation as to what you’re doing or what the consequences are it can make for an irritating trial and error learning curve.
The gameplay itself, from what I can gather, revolves mostly around doing odd jobs for the people in and around the major areas of the world. The starting village offered only two that I found. One was a completely incompetent housewife who has apparently lost ever single sharp object in her kitchen and wants you to cut vegetables for her. A simple enough task and, really, kind of expected given the type of game you’re playing. However, the “mission” consists basically of you standing on one side of the screen and the woman kneeling on the other. She then proceeds to throw shit at you! And it’s not just veggies, people! I don’t know if she was just completely nuts or what, but the bitch starts tossing furniture at you like it’s no big deal. So, now you’re dodging wooden lamps and the like while trying to chop this dumb woman’s produce. Okay. But does she throw them in any kind of rhythm? Hell no. She gets clever and mixes up the pace randomly. I don’t know about you, but if someone wanted me to do them a favor and then tried to bludgeon me and, barring that, went out of their way to make said favor unnecessarily difficult, I’d toss up a finger and walk the hell away. And slap her kids on the way out just for spite.
The second “task giver,” if you will, was a perverted old lady who is apparently just this side of delusional. To “earn her trust” (to what end I never gathered) she gives you tasks that she feels are menial and, in reality, are ridiculously difficult or just so…fucking weird…that it wasn’t long before I wished for the stupid housewife’s flying produce. The first task I was sent on was a mission to locate this crazy old broad’s Lucky Underwear. I’m not even kidding here. It seems that she takes this pair of sacred panties with her wherever she goes—why she doesn’t wear them, I’m not sure I want to know—and she has misplaced them on one of her many walks. Okay, so you’re being sent on your standard early-game fetch mission. Got it. But why the hell are you hunting down an old lady’s underoos?!?! I mean, I understand that this is a Japanese game and, well, the Japanese culture is, by and large, far stranger when it comes to this type of humor, but come on! The task itself isn’t all that difficult. You run out, find the old granny’s panties and you bring them back. The problem is, apparently they smell like fish or something because once you have them, you are instantly the object of desire for the crows that inhabit the area in which the underwear is found. Like moths to a flame, the little feathery bastards chase you around and try to steal the garment. Again, I ask…why?
The second of the three tasks she gave me was to push her around. She’s old—duh—and doesn’t have the energy to walk down the friggin’ road from where she is and stand on the bridge overlooking the creek she’s already standing next to! Okay, gently push the old nut few yards down the road. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. So very…very…wrong. First off, the designers made the controls for movement roughly two speeds, standing still and sprinting like a maniac. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with movement being sped up in a game where I have to walk everywhere. But when you want me to push an old lady without pissing her off by being too rough, give me an option to toggle a walk mode, eh? Or, at the very least, allow me to grab onto her or pick her up. No, what you have here is the equivilant of pushing a chair covered with bacon grease! There doesn’t seem to be any point of contact that will last more than an inch before you slip off and start running past her. It’s unbelievable, really.
But! That’s right…BUT!
As annoying as that task was, she isn’t through! It seems that three of the village’s children like to run away once in a while and you—the nameless stranger with a sword—are the best possible option for finding them and bringing them home. Okay, okay, okay…no. That’s just too much for me. The lady just fucking met you and she wants you to find the kids who ran away?! You were dragged off a battlefield and no one knows if you’re a bloodthirsty murderer or amnesiac pedophile! I mean, c’mon! You willingly went on a mission to find her panties! That, in my mind, does not a good babysitter, make! But, okay, it is a game, after all so let’s take the job. The three children are hiding randomly in one of the major areas and you have to talk to them one at a time and get all three to follow you before the mission’s over. The problem, though, is that if you bump one of them (which is easy to do given the aforementioned movement control) the little bastard then spends the rest of the mission kicking the shit out of your shins.
Now, this would be a little funny if it didn’t take a decent sized chunk of your life away as well as make it irritatingly difficult to speak to the other children since every kick knocks you out of the conversation! By the end of this mission I found myself running from a 6-year-old just to talk to his friends and keep from pulling my sword and taking that little foot right the fuck off! By and by, not a fun mission. Not a fun mission at all!
Well, that about covers the milk and honey of what I played of the game. The bulk of the filler gameplay, if you will. So, what about the combat? Nearly non-existent if you don’t want to murder everyone in sight. Yes, you can fight pretty much anyone, but unless you do something untoward around them or attack them directly, no one wants to fight you. I spent roughly 3 or so hours with this game all said and done and got into maybe 5 fights. For a game about a wandering warrior, this seems a might on the weak side. One of those fights is pretty much necessary when you leave the mean old guy’s land—unless you want to help the thugs picking on a woman right outside the gate—and serves mainly as a way to get a feel for the fighting. Which, by the way, is relatively straightforward: A to jump, X for weak attack, Y for strong attack and right bumper for block. Other than that, your options are to attack with the lethal side of the weapon (be it sword or staff) or flip it and use the blunt side. Using the blunt side inspires some interesting dialogue from your foes while the lethal side offers a chance to Quick Kill your opponent which, in this case, is an homage to how most sword duels played out. It wasn’t always a lengthy volley of blades, but, rather, a contest of who could unsheathe their sword first.
The second of my small list of fights was the result of the way a conversation played out and was actually rather cool in that respect. The fight itself was short and felt as if I had murdered the man. But, hey, I don’t think butterflies are the most beautiful thing in the world, what can I say? The next fight was Butterfly Guy’s friends (another cool aspect of the game’s ability to track who you’ve killed) and the last two were random encounters with a Killer and the daughter of some samurai I supposedly killed in battle.
Both of those, sadly, ended in my untimely demise.
Hey…that chick could handle a sword!
The last death was, unfortunately, the last time I played the game. Quite simply, it bored the hell out of me. It’s just not interesting. There are a lot of solid ideas and the pieces for a great game, sure. But they were put together by a monkey with Down Syndrome…and, judging by the PS2-quality graphics, that monkey was blind as well.
Poor monkey…someone should get him a better job.
Meanwhile, I’ll play some more MAG and forget about being a samurai.
For now…
Okay, so it’s no secret that I love samurai. That said, it’s easy to assume that I’m a fan of most things featuring samurai in one form or another. From the classics like The Seven Samurai to some more obscure things like the Onimusha series. If it’s got samurai in it, chances are I’ll give it a chance. So, in that respect, when I got a whiff of the Way of the Samurai series several years ago—I think a little over 4 years now…maybe more—it’s obvious I was excited.
Here was a game that allowed me to take on the role of a wayward Ronin—masterless samurai—and choose to help the people of a village in need of a hero or take over the gang of bandits and reek havoc on the dingy citizens as I saw fit…or I could simply pass the village by and legitimately end the game in 10 seconds. I, being the paragon that I am when it comes to gaming, always choose to help those in need. And, from that point forward it was an amazing romp through the fictional life of a Ronin. I loved it.
So, when it was announced that WotS3 was on its way, I was stoked. It was one of the highest games on my list of “must haves” for October this year. But, sadly, as the game’s release drew nearer and more reviews were surfacing, the edge on the sword that was my fervor began to dull. It seemed that this latest installment in an otherwise inspired series was somewhat lacking. All the key elements were there, but the meat was a little on the lean side. After reading the last average scored review, I decided that I’d throw it on my GameFly list and wait to play it when I got around to it.
Well, last week I received the notice that the game was on its way and, low and behold, my excitement shot right back up to its original zest. I was pumped.
Then it showed up.
And I put it in the Xbox…
And was sorely disappointed.
It’s not that the game is totally horrible. It’s just that I can’t seem to figure out how to find the parts that aren’t. First off, let me tell you that, should you choose to play this game, you need to speak to a minstrel (the little old dudes with the string instrument—Biwa—found in every major area) and get him to play a song. This isn’t really made readily apparent at first and, thus, I found myself creating my character from scratch on three separate occasions. That is to say, three times from not saving; if you die, you can load from a previous save or start over with any experience, yen and weapons accrued in your previous playthrough.
As for the game itself, there are definitely a lot of great ideas here. The core concept of the game—the reason I was drawn to the series—is present but, for me at least, felt more like an inspiration than an actual element of the gameplay. From what I could tell there is little in the way of story to be found and what snippets I did experience, were few and far between and made little to no sense to me. When you start the game, your character awakens—after a brief cutscene where you pass out in front of a couple of battlefield looters—in a small home in a village. When you exit the home you are greeted by a mean old man (presumably the owner of the home) and can actually accidentally skip the whole encounter and not be able to go back, thus having no idea what the hell is going on—not that the encounter really gives you much to go on in the first place.
The accidental skipping involves a system in which every major conversation can be interrupted by one of two choices: throwing yourself to the ground and groveling or drawing your weapon. The former usually has you kneel like an idiot and then get up and walk away, completely skipping the conversation and erasing any chance of repeating it. The latter…well…you can imagine what might happen there. This is a cool system in theory, but with no explanation as to what you’re doing or what the consequences are it can make for an irritating trial and error learning curve.
The gameplay itself, from what I can gather, revolves mostly around doing odd jobs for the people in and around the major areas of the world. The starting village offered only two that I found. One was a completely incompetent housewife who has apparently lost ever single sharp object in her kitchen and wants you to cut vegetables for her. A simple enough task and, really, kind of expected given the type of game you’re playing. However, the “mission” consists basically of you standing on one side of the screen and the woman kneeling on the other. She then proceeds to throw shit at you! And it’s not just veggies, people! I don’t know if she was just completely nuts or what, but the bitch starts tossing furniture at you like it’s no big deal. So, now you’re dodging wooden lamps and the like while trying to chop this dumb woman’s produce. Okay. But does she throw them in any kind of rhythm? Hell no. She gets clever and mixes up the pace randomly. I don’t know about you, but if someone wanted me to do them a favor and then tried to bludgeon me and, barring that, went out of their way to make said favor unnecessarily difficult, I’d toss up a finger and walk the hell away. And slap her kids on the way out just for spite.
The second “task giver,” if you will, was a perverted old lady who is apparently just this side of delusional. To “earn her trust” (to what end I never gathered) she gives you tasks that she feels are menial and, in reality, are ridiculously difficult or just so…fucking weird…that it wasn’t long before I wished for the stupid housewife’s flying produce. The first task I was sent on was a mission to locate this crazy old broad’s Lucky Underwear. I’m not even kidding here. It seems that she takes this pair of sacred panties with her wherever she goes—why she doesn’t wear them, I’m not sure I want to know—and she has misplaced them on one of her many walks. Okay, so you’re being sent on your standard early-game fetch mission. Got it. But why the hell are you hunting down an old lady’s underoos?!?! I mean, I understand that this is a Japanese game and, well, the Japanese culture is, by and large, far stranger when it comes to this type of humor, but come on! The task itself isn’t all that difficult. You run out, find the old granny’s panties and you bring them back. The problem is, apparently they smell like fish or something because once you have them, you are instantly the object of desire for the crows that inhabit the area in which the underwear is found. Like moths to a flame, the little feathery bastards chase you around and try to steal the garment. Again, I ask…why?
The second of the three tasks she gave me was to push her around. She’s old—duh—and doesn’t have the energy to walk down the friggin’ road from where she is and stand on the bridge overlooking the creek she’s already standing next to! Okay, gently push the old nut few yards down the road. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. So very…very…wrong. First off, the designers made the controls for movement roughly two speeds, standing still and sprinting like a maniac. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with movement being sped up in a game where I have to walk everywhere. But when you want me to push an old lady without pissing her off by being too rough, give me an option to toggle a walk mode, eh? Or, at the very least, allow me to grab onto her or pick her up. No, what you have here is the equivilant of pushing a chair covered with bacon grease! There doesn’t seem to be any point of contact that will last more than an inch before you slip off and start running past her. It’s unbelievable, really.
But! That’s right…BUT!
As annoying as that task was, she isn’t through! It seems that three of the village’s children like to run away once in a while and you—the nameless stranger with a sword—are the best possible option for finding them and bringing them home. Okay, okay, okay…no. That’s just too much for me. The lady just fucking met you and she wants you to find the kids who ran away?! You were dragged off a battlefield and no one knows if you’re a bloodthirsty murderer or amnesiac pedophile! I mean, c’mon! You willingly went on a mission to find her panties! That, in my mind, does not a good babysitter, make! But, okay, it is a game, after all so let’s take the job. The three children are hiding randomly in one of the major areas and you have to talk to them one at a time and get all three to follow you before the mission’s over. The problem, though, is that if you bump one of them (which is easy to do given the aforementioned movement control) the little bastard then spends the rest of the mission kicking the shit out of your shins.
Now, this would be a little funny if it didn’t take a decent sized chunk of your life away as well as make it irritatingly difficult to speak to the other children since every kick knocks you out of the conversation! By the end of this mission I found myself running from a 6-year-old just to talk to his friends and keep from pulling my sword and taking that little foot right the fuck off! By and by, not a fun mission. Not a fun mission at all!
Well, that about covers the milk and honey of what I played of the game. The bulk of the filler gameplay, if you will. So, what about the combat? Nearly non-existent if you don’t want to murder everyone in sight. Yes, you can fight pretty much anyone, but unless you do something untoward around them or attack them directly, no one wants to fight you. I spent roughly 3 or so hours with this game all said and done and got into maybe 5 fights. For a game about a wandering warrior, this seems a might on the weak side. One of those fights is pretty much necessary when you leave the mean old guy’s land—unless you want to help the thugs picking on a woman right outside the gate—and serves mainly as a way to get a feel for the fighting. Which, by the way, is relatively straightforward: A to jump, X for weak attack, Y for strong attack and right bumper for block. Other than that, your options are to attack with the lethal side of the weapon (be it sword or staff) or flip it and use the blunt side. Using the blunt side inspires some interesting dialogue from your foes while the lethal side offers a chance to Quick Kill your opponent which, in this case, is an homage to how most sword duels played out. It wasn’t always a lengthy volley of blades, but, rather, a contest of who could unsheathe their sword first.
The second of my small list of fights was the result of the way a conversation played out and was actually rather cool in that respect. The fight itself was short and felt as if I had murdered the man. But, hey, I don’t think butterflies are the most beautiful thing in the world, what can I say? The next fight was Butterfly Guy’s friends (another cool aspect of the game’s ability to track who you’ve killed) and the last two were random encounters with a Killer and the daughter of some samurai I supposedly killed in battle.
Both of those, sadly, ended in my untimely demise.
Hey…that chick could handle a sword!
The last death was, unfortunately, the last time I played the game. Quite simply, it bored the hell out of me. It’s just not interesting. There are a lot of solid ideas and the pieces for a great game, sure. But they were put together by a monkey with Down Syndrome…and, judging by the PS2-quality graphics, that monkey was blind as well.
Poor monkey…someone should get him a better job.
Meanwhile, I’ll play some more MAG and forget about being a samurai.
For now…
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