Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits - Bushido Retsuden (Neo Geo CD)

 Back when I was about eleven or twelve, I'd started to become a bit obsessed with fighting game lore, specifically the Street Fighter and Rival Schools games. I was also still in my post-Final Fantasy VII RPG phase, so naturally, I wished "if only there were RPGs to flesh out the stories of my favourite fighting games". Of course, back then, I had no idea about things like Gamest Mooks full of insane amounts of lore for arcade games in general, not just fighting games (and I still think that if some publisher had translated those tomes back then, western arcades would have stayed healthy just a little longer). And though I wouldn't play any SNK fighting games until the advent of the Dreamcast a few years later, I did somehow become aware of this game, whose title has since been translated as "Samurai Shodown - Tales of the Bushido" (though among many English-speaking fans, it had colloquially been known as simply "Samurai Shodown RPG" for a long time).

 

Despite having no knowledge of the Samurai Shodown series, its plot, or its characters, just the existence of an RPG based on a fighting game series was enticing to me. Unfortunately, there was no English version at all back then, nor would there be until only a few months ago at the time of my writing this review! So when this fantranslation came out, it was something of a holy grail being found after decades of waiting. I don't play RPGs as much as I used to, so it didn't excite me as much now as it would have then, but it's still pretty exciting. And having now played a few hours of it, it's not a disappointment!

 

You start the game by picking one of six characters, and one of two storylines. I went with Cham Cham, and the second storyline, which is about a bunch of demons trying to resurrect their leader by collecting negative human emotions in seven ancient bells around the world. Shortly after you start playing, you also get to pick a second character to join your poarty, though unfortunately, it turns out that you're only picking them for their mechanical use, and they don't actually get to join in any dialogue scenes. I guess the number of possible combinations there would have made for an insane amount of extra writing for the devs, though. I went with Nakoruru, which turned out to make for a somewhat complimentary team: Cham Cham focuses on attacking groups of enemies, and Nakoruru does powerful attacks against single enemies, plus she has a healing spell.

 

You're given the unusualy option of having to use special move inputs from the actual fighting games to use specials in battle, but I opted not to, because I'm not super-familiar with the SS series, plus the battles are turn-based anyway, so it's just a bit of a gimmick more than anything. If they'd used a Final Fantasy-style active time battle system or something similar, I can see how skipping menus would have been useful. What's slightly unusual is that your normal attacks do very little damage, and you're expected to use specials more often than not. All of your specials consume SP, which complicates matters further. For example, Cham Cham has a useful attack that damages every enemy, but it also uses a lot of SP, and her pool isn't that big, so until she's levelled up a few times, she can only use that attack maybe four or five times before needing to replenish. In contrast, Nakoruru's specials are all single-target, but they use very little SP, and she has tons of it to spare anyway. Not being able to just mindlessly select the attack option like in most older RPGs is something you'll get used to quickly, and it does make things a lot more interesting.

 

This being an SNK game from the nineties, the graphics are also worthy of note. As you might expect, the game contains an absurd bounty of beautiful, detailed pixel art. The characters all look great, and full of life, the backgrounds are similarly lived-in and packed with detail, and there's even lots of weird and cool monster sprites to fight in battle. I'm pretty sure it's all been made bespoke for this game, too, with no recycling from its parent series. Even the battle sprites for your characters are specially drawn to a smaller scale than the fighting games, but still as detailed and interesting as everything else. The music and sound effects are exactly as you'd expect from a Samurai Shodown game, too: traditional, quiet, and subdued.

 

If you're at all interested in the Samurai Shodown series and its lore, or in games from the nineties golden age of RPGs, I definitely recommend giving this a try. Like I said, I've been playing it for a few hours now, and it's yet to wear out its welcome, even despite its relatively slow pace. I'll definitely be continuing to play it for a few weeks, at least, if not all the way to the end of the story.