Way of the Samurai 2

After using the game's character creation tool to create your Samurai's identity you are dropped into the town of Amahara. Literally. Your character approaches the gates of the town and collapses from exhaustion. A little girl offers the Samurai her lunch and three goons will approach you on the street in some way, but after that, the idea is that your path is yours to decide. After your initial encounter with the girl, the game builds to one of three conclusions: you live for ten days, you are killed, or you leave Amahara. All end with your Samurai starting over again.

The town is in a three-way struggle for dominance and who you decide to help will determine how people treat you. By performing jobs for the Job Broker in the center of town and patronizing shops and restaurants gain influence for the townspeople. However, the towns Magistrates are corrupt and have begun harassing innocent civilians on the street. There is also the Aoto Gang, the local arm of the Yakuza, who have been readying for a war by causing carnage in the streets. Finally, the shadow of the Shogun has begun to cover the town in an attempt to control the people more directly, whether they're townspeople, Magistrates, or members of the Aoto Gang.

Of course, none of this is told to the player at first. Only through pure trial and error will you learn how to affect the town's perception of you. Way of the Samurai 2 is built as a self contained game each play through. After the ten days, or after one for your Samurai's many deaths will put your character right back in the beginning with the girl. To replay all of the same scenes you've gone through before and attempting to change once again.

As if the constant replaying of the same scene wasn't bad enough, Way of the Samurai 2 is almost too open ended. Hints and clues as to how to really play the game to affect your perception aren't given to you until you play through the game several times. The game is so open ended that if you give the wrong response to the wrong person the already loose narrative will grind to a halt and you'll be forced to perform odd jobs for pocket change until the ten days are up. Although I will admit it is very easy to become an evil Samurai by killing a few innocent people. The reaction is very clear for that: warriors and Magistrates will attack you on sight and townspeople will run away in terror.

This is actually where the game begins to get good. The fighting engine is very deep as your Samurai has the ability to learn the intricacies of fifty different swords, each with it's own set of learnable combos and special moves and it's own fighting style. Hacking, slashing, blocking and special moves must all be combined together to win and it's a true challenge (and the best part of the game) to become an expert swordsman.

However, it also leads to one of the worst parts of the game as the camera is awkward and sword management is very tedious. First things first, the camera swings wildly all over the place. Maybe this was a conscious decision by Acquire to make the game more cinematic, but it's brutal when trying to fight. The camera will zoom in for a close up of the action, then it will pull back to face your Samurai, then it will get stuck behind a rice vendors stand. It's all very frustrating. The camera can be fixed through careful manipulation and readjustment, but that just leaves you open to attack as you're too focused on fixing the camera. The camera is actually at it's worst when your Samurai is near the exit of an area. The camera will pull straight back very far, often positioning itself behind whatever objects you're near. So then you can't see your Samurai and you don't know how far you are to the exit. And if you exit, all your fighting was for nothing because you can't go back to continue the fight.

Now about that pesky sword management system. Your Samurai can only hold three swords at a time. All of the rest are kept in the sword safe, which can only be accessed from the map screen. So it is possible to hold all fifty swords, but when you find a sword next to your fallen opponent, there's no way to look at its stats without picking it up. And if you have three swords, you have to drop one first. And if you don't like your new sword, you have to drop it and pick up the old one. Now imagine doing this after a large battle has left twenty swords on the ground. That's what I thought.

I will say this though; Way of the Samurai 2 has a very interesting look and feel. The voice acting is downright atrocious, with each character (and the narrator) speaking in a tone that invokes a bad dubbed movie. Again, maybe that was intentional, but it just comes off completely ridiculous sounding. Which is a shame, because the background music is filled with a rousing chorus of ancient Japanese sounding music and it sounds great. For all of its cinematic hooks, the music was the one thing Way of the Samurai 2 got right.

The graphics of the game suffer from the same split personality. The buildings and streets of the town all look the same and have no personality. It's actually possible to get lost as everything blends into everything else. But then, the town isn't that big, so you will be exploring the same few parcels of land over and over again. And then restarting the ten days and doing it over and over again, again. The repetitiveness is just too much. But on the other hand, the character designs are fantastic. The townspeople you interact with all have a distinct personality with their own mannerisms and fantastic costume design. And the Samurai creation tool that opens the game can eventually be filled with all sorts of different clothes and hairstyles to create some great looking Samurai warriors.