A stylish slash 'em up creaking under the weight of its own ideas.
Even going into the final stretch of The Spirit of the Samurai, I was still unsure if I had understood the fundamentals of its combat. Enemies were every bit as twitchy and unpredictable as they had been at the start of the game, but I still had no idea whether my custom combos were good or bad. Merely that I was getting by, with an increasing reliance on spamming consumable projectiles and chugging my way through a stream of healing potions. It was working, so maybe this was intended? I honestly still don’t know.
The Spirit of the Samurai’s strongest suit is, above all, striking visuals. It’s a linear platform hack n’ slasher (not a metroidvania at all, despite what the store page may claim) about a samurai with a destiny, and an evil demon lord that needs sending back to the underworld. Every scene from an overrun village to the demon lord’s vaguely organic fortress is a treat to look at, detailed and bespoke, and while there’s not a huge number of environments (owing to the game clocking in at maybe 4 hours, deaths and copious cutscenes included), they’re all impressive works of art.
It even moves interestingly! All of the game’s pre-rendered sprites are beautifully lit and layered, with just enough tilt-shift effect to sell the game’s unusual stop-motion animation style. Characters and monsters alike snapping along at intentionally low framerates, artificially channeling the likes of Ray Harryhausen. It’s a great look, and clearly something that vast amounts of time and effort has been poured into.
So why are the cutscenes not using the same stop-motion style as the gameplay? Instead, just playing out at a steady 30 frames a second, without the curious collection of visual effects. It almost feels like the two halves of the visuals were produced independently of each other, and don’t quite dovetail right. That sense of the disparate parts of the game not quite being glued together properly carries through to almost all of the mechanics.
Hacked off
Probably the worst offender is combat. There’s clearly some interesting ideas here. You have three points of health, but you only take damage once your stamina bar is drained—a bit like flipping the script on Sekiro, with enemies having regular health bars but the player working on a three-strikes system. Unfortunately, with enemies loving to attack from multiple directions at once and roll around unpredictably, taking the couple hits necessary to score a wound is all too easy.
With blocking, jumping and dodging costing precious stamina, it’s possible to die in just a few unlucky seconds, especially if an enemy is too close to you, which causes your character to kick at them ineffectually instead of swinging his sword like you wanted him to.
And even when you can swing, hitting enemies is also more fiddly than it should be. While there’s a dedicated attack button, most attacks are performed by tilting the right analogue stick in a direction and holding it there. Each direction has one fixed attack, plus two open combo slots that you can put two (of a couple dozen) possible moves in, creating a custom combo string. Interesting on paper, but I found most heavier attacks left me open to more near-instant death. And so I ended up ignoring most of the systems and moves in favour of a quick string that stunlocked all but the biggest and most annoying of monsters.
There are also some systems that just feel like they’ve been included because other games had them. Almost every scene is littered with collectible items that you either need to mash the use button to stop and play an animation to scoop up. Worse yet, additional items are hidden in barrels and crates that need to be whacked a couple times before you can stop once more to grab the dropped goodies.
Grab bag
Enemy bodies also need to be manually looted, and why? Because they’re full of random junk items that you can trade in for gold to buy consumables, effectively adding two or three extra steps to even the simplest purchase. Why do these junk items even exist when the game could have just given you the money instead? Why do I have to stop and pick up every last one? The lingering question the game always left me with is “why?”
There’s so many ideas and systems here, but they don’t add anything to the experience. I’m a huge fan of weird, technical combat systems in games (give me God Hand’s custom combo system and directional dodging any day of the week), but very little here feels like it’s in service of any kind of coherent design, and that’s frustrating. Things feel like they happen arbitrarily. You earn XP, you make stats go up, but their impact is barely felt or even explained. It’s just one more little distraction.
This pursuit of novelty even manifests in the form of a couple short stealth segments where you play as the samurai’s kitten, an adorable critter that—when paired with the main character—attacks and immobilizes even the biggest demons handily. Until you’re playing as the cat, at which point everything becomes a threat to be evaded. That sense again that there’s two ideas happening at once that don’t quite gel. They’re not terrible stealth segments, and the platforming is serviceable, but they’re completely inessential.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that The Spirit of the Samurai has all the parts of a consistently good game, but in assembly someone threw an extra box of arbitrary gubbins into the mix. The visuals and atmosphere were just about enough to see me through to the end of the game across a single afternoon, but looking back, I wish I could have pulled out half of the game’s guts, just to see if it made more sense without them. A strangely dissatisfying feeling. But if my growing ennui isn’t enough to stop you, then The Spirit of the Samurai is out now on Steam.
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