Samurai Deeper Kyo (Playstation)

 

 Like TV Animation X and Inu-Yasha, this is yet another fighting game released late in the Playstation's life, and based on a then-current anime. Unlike those other two, I've never seen the anime Samurai Deeper Kyo, and I know pretty much nothing about it, except that there's videogame tie-ins on Playstation and Game Boy Advance. If you wanted to be glib and more than a little unfair, you could call this one "a poor man's Last Blade 2". Unfair both because most games pale in comparison to Last Blade 2, and because Samurai Deeper Kyo's not a bad game at all.

 

Another thing it has in common with the Inu-Yasha game is that the controls and special move inputs are a lot simpler than those seen in "proper" fighting games. In fact, there are two control methods, one with single button specials and a truncated movelist in general, plus one that's a little more complex ( but not by much). There's also an assist system, which under default settings, triggers automatically every time your assist meter fills up, which makes things mildly chaotic in a fun way. Also, I don't know the plot explanation for this, but in story mode, a lot of the time, each opponent you beat will be your assist character for the next fight. Is this just the old shonen "defeat equals friendship" trope manifest in videogame form?

 

Other than the basics of the game itself, there's some other points of interest I'd like to address. First, one of the playable characters is a blonde girl with a handgun, who, through her end poses and other flavour animations, seems like she's meant to at least partially be a joke character. But, she's also the only one who brought a gun to a swordfight, and as you'd expect, she's a very effective fighter, with a moveset almost totally made up of projectile attacks. Another character has a spider theme, and can send spiders to attack her opponents, as well as summoning webs. She can even use webs to entangle her opponent's assist meter, though I only did this once and never figured out how to replicate it.

 

Something else that really stands out is the backgrounds. All of them really well-drawn pixel art backdrops, with cherry blossom trees, moonlit nights, soft rain, sunsets, and more. Unfortunately, this is an area that really does draw comparisons to the Last Blade games, since they're so thematically similar. Of course, in such a comparison, Samurai Deeper Kyo falls short: its backgrounds are very sparsely animated, when they're animated at all, and oddly, there's no people or animals in any of them. It gives that a strange, empty feeling. It's only a very minor complaint, but it is something that really stood out to me as I played.

 

Samurai Deeper Kyo isn't anything particularly life-changing or roundbreaking, but it's a decent enough game, and in my experience, you can never have too many decent enough fighting games. It's also one of those games that I feel like would've been a hit among my friends, if we'd have known about and had access to it at the time of its release, even if we didn't ever get to see the anime itself. It's definitely worth your time.

Stealth (SNES)

 This is a game I'd never heard of before last week, when the name stood out to me for some reason while I was looking for something else. I looked it up online, and the idea of a turn-based strategy game with a focus on stealth sounded appealing, despite the unpleasant thematic aspect of playing as American soliders in the Vietnam war. Unfortunately, this wasn't a lucky find, as the game turned out to be awful.

 

The first thing you need to know is that this isn't a game where you're being stealthy, it's a game where your enemies are being stealthy. Furthermore, they have some ludicrous advantages over you. First, you can only see them on the map when they're attacking you during their turns. On its own, this wouldn't be too bad, and it could add a little memory test aspect to proceedings, having you shoot where you saw the enemy's gunfire originate. However, it's couple with another advantage that pretty much makes the game unplayable: unlike your men, the enemy can move after they shoot.

 

So you're essentially blindly wandering around the jungle, maybe shooting at random squares in the hopes that there's an enemy there, while every time they take a turn, they'll be able to damage multiple of your men. One of your guys does have the limited option to call airstrikes, but even so, you're still firing blind, and in the several attempts I've made at playing the game, an airstrike has never killed more than one enemy, and sometimes doesn't get any at all.

 

So, it's not a fun game. It's not an attractive one, either! It's ugly enough that I would've suspected that it was originally intended for release on the original Famicom and got shifted over to Super Famicom as that market shrank, were it not also for it having been released in 1992, and also being (as far as I can tell) the first game from its developers. It's not the first time their work has been on this blog, though, as they were also responsible for Tarot Uranai on 3DO, which at least looked nice.

 

Stealth is a game that, as far as I can see, has no redeeming qualities, and you definitely shouldn't bother playing. It's boring, slow, and fundamentally broken. The most interesting thing I think can be said about it is that GameFAQs listed five other, completely unrelated games also just called Stealth. Maybe some of those might be better?

The Police 24 (PC)

 Despite the name, this game isn't to be confused with Konami's light gun arcade game Police 24/7, and despite the general look of the title screen, it's also not to be confused with an entry into the Simple 2000 Series. It is, however, from DesireFactory, the developer(s?) of the Fighting Oddball series of fighting games, and like those games, it makes heavy use of digitised photos for its sprites and backgrounds. (I actually have a physical copy of one of those games lying around somewhere, but iirc, I failed to get it running on a modern PC).

 

It's a single plane beat em up, made in an engine designed for fighting games. This awkward situation shows in some little things, like how regular enemies have little health bars above their heads while bosses have proper full size ones across the screen from your health bar, like your opponents would have in a fighting game. There's also something of an abundance of buttons, maybe the most I've ever seen used in the genre. You've got three different levels of regular attacks, a King of Fighters-esque dodge roll button, a taunt button, and a guard button. Plus, you have a burst-type ability that you execute by pressing roll and taunt together. PLUS there's a bunch of special moves with fighting game-style motions.

 

Each of the three stages has you fighting through a few screens of yakuza guys, in either dark or light-coloured suits, then there'll be a cutscene and a boss fight. It'll feel a little awkward at first, but once you get used to the controls, and to how enemies react to being attacked, it quickly becomes a lot of fun. You'll be figuring out easy and amusing little juggle combos and so on, and the comedic aspect is obviously enhanced by the digitised graphics. There's just something about these actual little photo people being kicked in the face and bouncing off the sides off of the screen. The bosses are Mario, Luigi, and a bigger yakuza guy. Judging by the cutscene in the first stage, it looks like the Mario Brothers are importing some kind of illegal mushrooms, which provides a sobering reminder that lazy, tedious gamer humour is not something that's restricted to the anglosphere. (Also, it obviously wasn't the dev's intention, since this game is well over a decade old, but: you're a cop beating up Luigi! Has a slightly different feel to it in the year 2025, doesn't it?)

 

The biggest problem this game has is that it's got a lot of promise in the way it plays, but it doesn't have enough actual game to really explore those mechanics. There's a massive movelist, and as mentioned, it's a lot of fun bouncing and chucking those yakuza guys around the screen. But the problem is that the game in its totality comprises nine screens of regular enemies (of which there are only two varieties), three boss fights, and that's it. There isn't even a score! A longer game, with more enemy types would provide more scope for playing with the mechanics and exploring the movelist. I know I'm asking a lot from what is probably a solo developer, but I'm reminded of Treasure's Tiny Toon Adventures game on GBA that felt a lot like it was a proof of concept demo for their later Astro Boy game on the same system. So, if this game ever got a sequel (and there's a chance it already did years ago, and I just haven't found it yet), I assume that game would probably live up to the potential.

 

I don't know if it's possible to actually buy this game anymore without scouring Japanese sites that sell pre-owned games, but it's definitely floating around online in various places, and if you like beat em ups and their potential as a genre, I definitely recommend giving it a look.