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Review: Bushido Blade (alternate 3) |
I have to concur with Valium here. When I first saw this game, I was stunned by the realism. Weapons deflect, one hit kills, walls interfering with the swing of your blade…
The graphics themself were great, even if they didn’t always render perfectly, with occasional transparency glitches. But there is a great deal of detail here, with motion blurs, the backgrounds and the characters and the bandages… each character even has two outfits, one that is seen during “story mode”, and one that is used in “training” and “versus” modes. Also, there is a pit of mud that you can jump into, and when you emerge, you find yourself smothered with it.
The animations for the characters are also fairly well done… considering how much work it must have been to do all six characters, each being able to wield eight different weapons… and also to build the animations for when they are crippled, wounded, thrashing around in their death throes, etc…
The controls are easy to use, combos easy to perform, even some of the more devestating ones… which I think is okay. This game isn’t about who knows more of those cool combos, it’s more about knowing when to use what move, so it’s more a matter of strategy than your ability to push a certain sequence of keys.
The sound is also amazing… you can hear the bubbling sounds of running water, trees swaying in the wind, wolves howling. And all of these sounds change as you run from place to place.
There’s just so much to this game that it’s hard to put it all down here in words. It just has to be played. When I first played, I was awed. And then for a while, I was confused and frustrated, because even though I had played more often than some friends, they could still beat me half the time. It seemed like the game was based on luck… but I stuck with it, and in time realized the great depth of this game. Now my other friend, who plays against me frequently, and I, can beat those “newbies” almost all the time. Oh, they’ll get the occasional lucky kill, we ain’t masters (yet, hehe), but you can tell who’s better. And my friend and I are still learning, we know there are moves we still haven’t learned yet. In fact, we just discovered a cool new move a few days ago, with the Katana or the Nodachi, where you bat away an opponent’s weapon and lunge in for the kill.
I’d definitely recommend this game for any Playstation owner, and encourage them to be patient with this game. It takes a while to understand and to become skilled at. But it’ll be worth the effort.
