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By Keith B (3rd Apr 2008)

Combining redundancy with monotony, Samurai Warriors: Katana proves only the most recent, and maybe most languid, incarnation of both videogame-designer malaise and the increasingly belaboured Dynasty/Samurai Warrior series.

Redundancy, like monotony, is often not thought of as a virtue. But for the creators of the Samurai Warriors series, redundancy, like monotony, is a safety-net. Consider, for starters, the series’ title: Samurai Warriors. Or, if we were wholly to anglicize it, Warriors Warriors; or to japanicize, Samurai Samurai. This is not a good omen.

In Samurai Warriors: Katana you are, predictably (oh---how predictable it all becomes!), a samurai. The game is set in Sengoku Japan--known as the “Warring States” period, which spanned some two centuries starting in the mid-fifteenth. Your job is to defend Oda Nobunaga, who hopes to conquer Japan, becoming the Demon King. (That all of this potted history is largely factually based, if augmented, is maybe all the more surprisingly considering the game’s shocking cultural disjunctions later on.) After this first campaign, which lasts several hours (!), you’ll be expected to endure, and I mean suffer, three more crusades, all of which replicate the first in all but ornamental ways.

Gameplay is passable, but hardly anything to write home about. The arcade-style design brings both pros and cons in largely predictable ways. The game feels sprightly--lots of energetic slashing, hacking, and killing. And though this gives the game a certain fast-paced frenzy, other areas flag. The game’s minions, for instance, seem to have been cut and pasted from some game-designer rolodex of ready-made space-fillers. The game, too, is long. Maybe even shockingly long, adding all the tedium of, say, extra innings in baseball but none of the logic: at least in that sport the innings produce an outcome; in SW, the game’s extra (and I mean extra) levels seem merely like rehashes of the first. But like a certain mascot bunny, the game just keeps going, and going, and going--seemingly impervious to the sleepy, toothless gameplay its designer, Omega Force, accepts as its standard.
Maybe most shockingly, the game’s control scheme offers surprising efficacy in a world of irksome monotony. With most Wii games, the control scheme usually offers something of an index to quality: bad control scheme usually means bad game. But if they get the Wii control scheme right--a feat in itself--how could they ever get everything else so, so wrong? But they do get it right, combining great close-range fighting, using (expectably) swords, spears, gigantic hammers, and weird medieval samurai-style stars, with cool if anachronistic long-range weaponry--bows, guns, canons, and boomerangs. Though even then the control scheme could be faulted, if for largely concomitant reasons: sword play, which is probably the Wii’s finest thus far, takes a back seat all too often to long-range fighting. When I think of samurai, I think of swords, not Pirates of the Carribean-style sloppy gunplay. Again, the control scheme itself is not to be faulted--but like great tuna in crummy sushi, it offers but little respite from its densely middling world of lacklustre design.

Visually the game is plain mediocre. Nothing here feels particularly well thought out or evenly thoroughly attempted. Much, indeed, seems lazily cribbed from Dynasty Warriors, the game’s forerunner, but even then this later instalment perceptibly lacks two things. In the one case, SW is in want of the at times consistent if hardly stunning quality of Dynasty; and, in the other, SW lacks the excusability of time--Dynasty was good for its day, but hardly would an intelligent (or even remotely ambitious) game-designer aspire to such notably dated and even then rather low feats of visual design.

The game’s soundscape fares little better, offering the same humdrum laxity of design as its quotidian visual cousin. The dialogue, in particular, offers much head-scratching for the attentive listener. Here much of the dialogue has been translated--albeit incredibly poorly--from the game’s original Japanese. As a result of this and the translator’s rather shoddy sense of American regional accents, we get numerous deracinated voices chirping in with seeming little sense of either logic or locale: the “New Yawk”-style mob voice (all the stranger considering New York was New Amsterdam at the time of the game’s setting, and thus Dutch); the mid-western dumbstruck yokel; and then some Japanese, sometimes wholly untranslated, at other times in a plainly unintelligible translation, which mixes garbled syntax with loopy diction. Translation, of course, is to be expected in a thoroughly globalized gaming industry--but, then again, hardly does that make the game’s laughably illegal Chinatown-DVD subtitling acceptable. In fact, in a truly worldly world of gaming, poor translation becomes even less acceptable: how many decades do these companies need before they just hire someone with remotely sensitive translation skills?

One of the game’s worst features is simply the way levels are organized. Each might take several hours to finish--and, sure, more is often better than less (or so the logic proceeds in videogame circles), though hardly could more of the same be termed a virtue--but each boss, confronted at the end of each level, is erratically different. In some cases you’ll fight not one but bosses; in other cases you’ll be pitched against a boss of rather unbelievable fighting skills, whose deft and seemingly impervious moves will decimate you within seconds; and at other times, the bosses will be cartoonishly easy to beat. Don’t be surprised to ask “Was that it?!” after chopping a boss to bits in a few neat strokes. Worse, though, is failing to beat a boss: shockingly the game lacks interlevel checkpoints, meaning you’ll have to dispose not merely of the boss’s minions on the way to the big guy, himself, but wade through the slough of plodding dialogue and bludgeoning instructions before the level proper even gets underway.

Ultimately Samurai Warriors: Katana is a failure, albeit not a total one. The control scheme, again, is shockingly good. Those frustrated by previous Wii swordplay incarnations--the beautiful if mystifyingly unplayable Red Steel, for instance--are well advised to rent SW for at least a taste of what the Wii can do with a bevy of disposable lackeys and a bit of ancient Japanese steel. But Wii-heads, in general--those who love the Wii’s usually fast-paced, easy-to-understand gaming experience--should avoid SW at all costs. The game in many ways feels like a demo, hastily created by Wii designers to illustrate the Wiimote and Nunchuk’s ease of use, while sacrificing originality, creativity, and diversity of gameplay. SW, like so many of its Dynasty and Samurai predecessors, is certain to be forgotten, being only recalled momentarily by gamers as a example of great swordplay, lamentably couched in a world of boredom.



Gameplay: 6/10
Single Play: 5/10
Friend Play: 5/10
Multi Play: /10
Visuals: 4/10
Sound: 4/10
Challenge: 5/10
Entertainment Rating: 5.5/10
Overall Rating: /10