Carbon copy doesn’t begin to describe the lack of originality in Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes from Capcom. The game plays like any of Koei’s Dynasty Warriors, which is a surprisingly uncreative development choice since every Dynasty Warriors game suffered from doppelganger syndrome. There’s not much to be found in this shallow game, but you will constantly find yourself wishing it were better. Zombie-like samurai, lack of save points and endless redundant battles make Sengoku Basara one game worth avoiding.
The character selection process gives you the illusion of diversity in this game. There are six characters to choose from. Each character has his or her unique weapon and a 16th century feudal Japanese story to tell, in English dub. Pick any of the characters and you will soon learn that they all fight in a similar lackluster fashion, regardless of weapon. Sword fighting with Masamune and Mitsunari is flashy but stale. Your basic attacks are slice, slice again, then do a bigger slice and finally throw in a jump slice. Snooze. Magoichi uses firearms, but her character will die quickly. Kanbe has a giant wrecking ball, along with the coolest of the character attacks. However, he fights like Zangief in Street Fighter complete with a spinning pile driver he does with his wrecking ball (it’s really a ball and chain he turned into a weapon). Finally, Ieyasu’s unarmed combat just seems random when everyone else has weapons. Each character has a Hero Time meter and a Basara meter. Hero Time is the Basara version of Bullet Time. If you charge up your Basara meter, you can let loose a kind of fury mode of more powerful hack-and-slash attacks. The thrill becomes mundane half way through the first use.
When you first start the game, each character has their own story to tell within this fantastical samurai world during the Muromachi and Edo Periods in Japan. Outside of some poor voicing by secondary characters, the cinematics do get you excited to play even if you don’t really have a sense of what’s going on. Then, there’s also some differentiation in the style of each character’s tale. Some characters will simply be fighting there way through a village, while other warriors may have to face undead samurai.
At first, you’ll think that killing samurai has never been so much fun, however mindless. Then, after you execute your first 300-hit combo and the game calls you Radical, you will start to wonder just what the heck are you doing. The button mashing seems to drag on endlessly. What’s worse is that all of the samurai execute the exact same movements at the same time. They even get hit as a cluster. If you’re Kanbe, with the wrecking ball, you can spin around nearly 20 samurai in the air at once. Yet, all of the enemy bodies are positioned in the exact same way.
The boss battles are slightly different. In these fights, there will still be several of mindless samurai, some of which are actually undead depending on which character you chose, but the actual boss will react differently. During the first boss battle, you will quickly realize that these bosses don’t die. What’s worse is that there are no save points within a mission. So if you die, which will be hard to avoid, you will have to start from the beginning of the board. This is easily the most frustrating technical flaw of Sengoku Basara. Each time you are thrust back to the beginning of a board, you will start to pick apart all of the flaws in the game. It’s as if the developers said, “Hey, just in case you didn’t notice that Sengoku Basara was poorly designed, you can start from the very beginning of every board and claw your way through one of the most arduous and painful games ever made for the Xbox 360 or PS3.” Just in case the point wasn’t clear. Don’t die. If you do, you will have to play the ENTIRE BOARD AGAIN. That had to be said twice.
Outside of the lack of save points, repetitive fighting and grueling gameplay, the environments feel surprisingly two-dimensional and flat. You do play the game in a full 3D world, but most of the set pieces can’t be broken. You can’t fall to your death. Your weapons often fly through the environment. And, everything you do has a sense of restriction.
Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes is a game that only a glutton for punishment can enjoy. The game plays like a title for the original Playstation or the Sega Genesis and is well worth avoiding. Consider this a treatise on how not to make a game or how to ruin a legendary piece of history.
