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?