Last week I finally decided to go to a place called Game Klub here in New Orleans. My friend Stone told me that they had SvC:Chaos there about a month earlier, but it did not spark my interest enough to take the 45 minute drive there – not to mention that I would have had to find the place also. When he called me up last weekend and told me that they had gotten Samurai Shodown 5, well now I was a bit more willing to go.

You see, in order to understand better why I was more willing, you need to know that Samurai Shodown was one of my favorite games in the arcade when it first came out. I would spend lots of time in front of this machine and would see it everywhere I went. This game is the initial game that sparked my deep love for SNK and the Neo-Geo system. When I finally got my MVS unit and my arcade built some 3 odd years ago Samurai Shodown was one of the first games that I bought. Even though it had been over 5 years since I had played the game the memories just flowed back to me as soon as the intro music came on and the cherry blossom pedals fell onscreen. It was bliss.

When I entered Game Klub for the first time it was strange. I could tell instantly that the building use to be a strip club just by the set up and the lighting arrangement. I was expecting mainly DDR machines and Beach Head 2000 like simulators, with Samurai Showdown 5 (SS5) to be sitting in some dark corner. I was pleasantly surprised to find SS5 near the entrance and most of the games in the front to be 2-D fighting game. There was a DDR machine in the back and a few racing games back there too, but I never really looked. They also had anime playing on a projection screen in the back as well. This place was a pleasant surprise indeed.

The first game I played of SS5 was right after Stone had taken the reigns and had to defend his quarter on the MVS cabinet. I picked Haohmaru because I knew him. That didn't last very long. Stone was using Suija, one of the new characters, and pummeled me. I could tell this was not his first time here. That first night there I spent a lot of the time experimenting with the new characters and also learning the new system. I really got a good feel for the game system and started to enjoy the many nuances that it brought to the game. The most notable element was the meditation and enlightenment mode.

In brief enlightenment works like this. If you have your rage bar slightly charged, but not in rage mode yet, you can hold the D button and raise the amount of time that you can be in enlightenment mode slowly (you can even meditate into enlightenment mode under the proper circumstances – see video Meditation into Enlightenment). You can continue to do this through out all of the matches, assuming that you have not used rage explosion or enlightenment previously. Now to enter enlightenment mode you have to have lost one match and be in the last bit of your health bar (it will turn blue, and is marked with an arrow), then you input QCB, CD and an image of you character will come on screen and the color pallet will go very gray.

When this happens a timer at the bottom of the screen will tick down and you will be able to move at normal speed while your opponent will be at a deathly slow crawl. The only benefit to this mode from being the one that has had this “slowness” happen to you is that if your blocking you can continue to block from all directions if your quick enough (e.g. if the player hits you mid on the left then jumps over you and hits you mid on the right then low right you can block all of this). If you’re not already blocking you’re pretty much screwed, but you can still do a rage explosion to buy some time.

The first time this happen to me the game felt incredibly broken. But I realized after a game or two that the enlightenment can happen at very predictable times. You also sacrifice a lot to build up your enlightenment meter (or what ever it is called) and not all characters are suited well for this (e.g. Enja will rage extremely quickly and does not get many opportunities to meditate).

The control scheme makes the game feel deceptively simple. There are mainly 3 buttons. Light slash (A), Medium Slash (B), Kick (C), now you have Hard slash (A+B), and an “extra” button (D) which allows you to hop, lay down, other weirdness. This setup allows even the most elementary of fighting game players to pick it up quickly. After a while you start to see that you’re only scratching the surface of the game with your basic moves and that there is something much deeper just under the surface of this game.

This game is amazingly well balanced. Characters that seem too powerful have stunningly apparent short comings. Take Enja for example; he has a combo that will take off about 2/3 of your life. This combo leaves him beyond open for attack after completion; he also is weak and takes heavy damage. Yoshitora has 7 different sword techniques, where the 7th one takes off one hell of a lot of health (see video: Yoshitora's Floating Butterfly Flower). The thing is, in order to do this 7th sword technique (Floating Butterfly Flower: hcb,f + BC) you have successfully connected with the other 6 sword techniques. There are many other great things in this game, and I too am only scratching the surface of them.

Go play this game. This game gives me great hope that SNKP still can do something amazing. I am now greatly looking forward to KOF’03 where as before I was not expecting much at all. I would not feel preemptive to call this game one of the best Samurai Shodown games released to date, but only time will tell for sure.

I took some pictures and a few videos of the game this week. My camera (and photography skills) are not the best, but you should take a look. I got some neat videos, but would like to mention that the sound in them is a bit off (read also: too loud). For all of the videos I am filming and my friend Stone is one of the players (usually doing the cool stuff). Enjoy.

-Shaper M.C.