Reviewed: April 28, 2006
Reviewed by: Mat Houghton

Publisher
Bandai

Developer
Grasshopper Manufacture

Released: April 11, 2006
Genre: Action
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Teen

3
5
6
5
4.0

Supported Features:

Well, I wish this game was that quirky and fast paced. Samurai Champloo: champloo delivers on the action, but falls quickly into stale repetition. By the third or fourth stage you feel like you just can’t be bothered to kill that next minion, you’ll come back when it’s someone important to kill. I mean there are separate over-lapping stories, much like happens in the show, but really you can’t help getting bored. Maybe it’s the voice “acting”.

First off your combo attacks are linked into the background music. In the top center of the screen there is a combo tree showing you what sequences of buttons will get you a combo, and these trees change depending on what music you have selected. Not only that, but you can switch between two tracks at any time, and you can extend the combo tree by smacking guys around.

Extending the combo tree also allows you to enter hyper mode by landing a hit with the proper combo. Doing this gives you a few seconds of impossibly fast hits, useful for those pesky bosses or just dispatching flunkies faster. Not only this, but there is also counter attack mode and “tate mode”. Counter attacking basically works like a simple version of Simon; buttons come up on the screen, hit them and get the counter.

“Tate mode” however, is weirder. When an enemy pops up with a star over his head, hit him. Then you get dropped into a mode where you hit the button displayed, then go on a button mashing frenzy, much like I would imagine a lab rat on crack would do if the button was part of a machine that dispensed more crack. If you succeed in getting over 100 hits in before time is up then you go into an even weirder mode where you kill 100 guys. After all of that you unlock a secret and then go back to the game where, you guessed it, you’re killing more guys.

All this sounds great, but there are some problems. The stages are very simple, usually just consisting of straight paths that you run down to an arena at the end. Not only this, but the enemies are endless, so sit there and kill as much as you want because it won’t stop. It’s not like they are particularly challenging either, mostly they are just punching bags appearing periodically for your amusement.

Also, this is one of the most load happy titles I’ve ever seen. Not only are there long, poorly animated story sequences, they are often broken up into multiple parts. There was one instance where I skipped through six story scenes before I got to any game play, so that’s at least double that number in loading screens. Think like you’re playing a really trashy version of Xenosaga that they didn’t even try to put make-up on.

What bugged me the most about this game were the screen transition controls. In general they are simple, you get to the edge of the screen and you’re prompted to hit the circle button, you do so and mayhem resumes. The first thing that really broke the game experience was that there were occasional gates you would run across which needed a certain number of special coins to pass through. While I dig that historically speaking that was kind of accurate, at that time in Japan travel was restricted by the Shogun, however in the game suddenly running into a door that is manned by a head in a box seems more than a little out of place with the rest of the game.

Worse though, is that in Mugen’s fourth stage (it’s really stage three, but the first one is numbered 0) they change from the circle button to the X button. This, of itself, is no big deal, if you just hit the X button once and then the screen changed. Instead of that much more sensible option the game designers decided that it would be cool to do a wall jump there to get through to the next screen. Never mind that this is the only place in the game where you can wall jump. Never mind that the only prompting the player is given is to just hit the X button. They’re smart folks, those gamers, they can figure it out.

I ran through every button on the controller twice, changed controllers and tried it again, decided the game was broken and finally got a clue from the producer at Namco Bandai that the double jump maneuver was the solution. So there’s the heads up to all you kids who don’t have access to the game’s producer.

Animations in the game aren’t too bad, if you aren’t looking too closely. For the most part the combat animations are good, though a little stiff and jerky. You feel like you’re watching a movie with a couple of frames missing every few seconds, so you go from pose to pose with nothing fluid in between. Worse though is the lip-synching. If the character’s mouths moved just out of synch with the dialogue that would be tolerable, because any movement at all is an improvement at this point.

Stylistically, the game is very much in line with the series. The characters all look at least vaguely like they should, and the crazy samurai soap come hip-hop remix feel is still there, but it really just ends up rather flat. Mostly because they rely on the same scene cuts and bits of “wacky” again and again, so instead of getting the same sort of inspired craziness it’s just like someone copied and pasted a bunch of Dalis together.

The environments you play through are also lacking, not in details, but just in general. You run through narrow paths that are blocked in by only the vaguest of backgrounds, and the textures and features along that path are rather pixilated and just poorly put together.

I would talk about special effects, but really, you can only beat a dead horse for so long before it becomes hamburger. Suffice it to say there is a reason that people who are burned by acid prefer to wear masks, and why it’s not considered polite to point and stare at people who have physical deformities. It’s just not polite.

This is all well and good, but the voice acting is terrible. T-E-R-R-I – well you get the idea. I think they got the same people who do the English language of the show to do the game, but it’s hard to tell. Mugen is especially erratic, sometimes sounding like a completely different actor during the same cut scene. Pronunciations run the gamut from good to painful, and that’s not even including the actual Japanese words they left in the game.

Samurai Champloo: champloo is halfway in between something that was rushed out the door to capitalize on the popularity of the series and a game that actually had some crafting. It’s worth the look for some mindless fun, but the price of admission is a bit high.