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Samurai Shodown

SNK's sword fight, where one cut could decide a round

Classic GamesSource-checked

SNK's 1993 Neo Geo fighting game, Samurai Spirits in Japan, armed twelve fighters in late 18th-century Japan with swords and other weapons, let them lock blades and lose their weapons, and rewarded a few heavy, well-timed blows over long combinations. Japan's Gamest named it game of the year. Its conversions were cut down to fit, and the series has run through sequels, 3D games and handhelds to a 2019 reboot.

Most fighting games of 1993 rewarded the player who could string blows together. Samurai Shodown rewarded the one who waited. Its fighters carried swords, claws and chains, its heavy cuts took a big share of the opponent’s life bar, and when two blades met the fighters locked together until one of them was disarmed. Nintendo Magazine System saw that it “relies more on counter attacks rather than combo’s”, and that the animals some fighters brought with them made distance a tactic in itself. Edge called it “a new breed of beat ’em up”.

SNK’s president Eikichi Kawasaki later told Retro Gamer that it had not started as a fighting game at all. “When we saw the original design documents for Samurai Shodown it was a horizontal scrolling action game,” he said. “As there were many requests from our customers to develop more fighting arcade games, we changed to a more traditional fighter.” It shared its structure, and its zooming camera, with SNK’s Art of Fighting, “but we used a totally different engine for it”.

Twelve fighters and a sorcerer

The game is set in Japan in the late 18th century. Amakusa Shiro Tokisada, a real leader of the 17th-century Shimabara rebellion, has been raised from the dead and brought the world to the edge of ruin. Twelve warriors come to stop him, and on the way they have to fight each other. In Japan the game was called Samurai Spirits.

The cast mixed Japanese swordsmen and figures from history with visitors from far away:

  • Haohmaru, a wandering samurai looking for strong opponents, whom Edge thought “almost like a ‘Ryu’ character”;
  • Nakoruru, a young Ainu girl who fights to protect nature, with her hawk Mamahaha;
  • Ukyo Tachibana, a sick swordsman fighting for a flower for the woman he loves;
  • Jubei Yagyu and Hanzo Hattori, both based on historical figures, and the kabuki actor Kyoshiro Senryo;
  • Galford, an American from San Francisco who went to Japan to become a ninja, with his dog Poppy;
  • Charlotte, a French noblewoman and fencer;
  • Earthquake, an enormous, slow American who keeps opponents at a distance with a chain;
  • Gen-An Shiranui, a monstrous figure with steel claws;
  • Wan-Fu, a Chinese warrior looking for fighters to help unify his homeland;
  • Tam Tam, a warrior sent to recover a sacred stone that Amakusa has stolen.

Blades, rage and the courier

When two fighters slash at the same moment, their weapons lock and both players hammer the buttons; whoever is slower is knocked back and disarmed, and has to walk over to pick the weapon up again while fighting with fists and feet. Weapons wear down each time they clash and can break. Each fighter also has a rage gauge, which fills as they take hits or block, and when it is full, as Nintendo Magazine System put it, it lets them “unleash more power in an attack or special move”. Heavy blows are played in slow motion. A referee, Kuroko, holds up a flag for each successful hit, and a courier runs across the back of the stage throwing in food, coins and bombs.

The Neo Geo’s sprite scaling let the camera zoom in when the fighters came close together and pull back when they parted, as Art of Fighting had done the year before.

Reception and censorship

Japan’s arcade magazine Gamest named it its game of the year for 1993; Nintendo Magazine System reported in 1994 that it had been “awarded the title of best arcade game of last year by the Japanese amusement press”. The game showed a good deal of blood, and some fights could end with the loser cut in half. SNK’s Japanese management censored the home cartridge for America and Europe, Retro Gamer recorded, so desperate players bought mod chips that let arcade cartridges run on the home machine.

Conversions

The Neo Geo cartridge held, by Nintendo Magazine System’s count, 100 megabits, and the home consoles had to make do with much less. Takara’s Super NES version squeezed it into 32 megabits; it kept all twelve fighters and their special moves but lost the zoom, so the sprites were smaller. Nintendo Magazine System still thought it “a good conversion of a fab SNK hit”. The Mega Drive and Mega-CD versions dropped Earthquake, probably because his sprite was too big, and the zoom. None of the three kept the finishing cuts; the Sega versions kept the blood, while the Super NES replaced it with “sweat”. The 3DO version kept the zoom and all the violence. There were also versions for the Game Boy and Game Gear.

The series

SNK followed it with a sequel almost every year in the mid-1990s. Samurai Shodown 64 (1997), on SNK’s Hyper Neo Geo 64 board, took the series into 3D; Retro Gamer judged that it “paled in comparison with Tekken 3 and Virtua Fighter 3”. Samurai Shodown games were among the launch titles of the Neo Geo Pocket in Japan in 1998 and of the Neo Geo Pocket Color in America in 1999. In 2004 SNK Playmore moved the series, with King of Fighters and Metal Slug, to Sammy’s Atomiswave arcade board. In 2019 SNK rebooted it with a new game simply called Samurai Shodown, released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and later on the Switch and PC.

Sources

  • Retro Gamer issue 39, 2007, p. 76: SNK history, part two (Kawasaki on the original design and the comparison with Art of Fighting; 18th-century Japan; the censorship sidebar).
  • Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, pp. 67–69: SNK history, part three (Samurai Shodown 64 on the Hyper Neo Geo 64; the Neo Geo Pocket and Pocket Color launch games; the censored AES releases and mod chips).
  • Edge issue 4, January 1994, pp. 70–71: Neo Geo review (weapons; Haohmaru, Galford, Earthquake, Gen-An; the zoom; “a new breed of beat ’em up”).
  • Nintendo Magazine System issue 25, October 1994, pp. 12 and 26–28: the Gamest award, the Super NES preview (twelve fighters, 32 megabits, dropped weapons, the rage gauge, no sprite scaling). Issue 27, December 1994, pp. 34–36: Super NES review (100 megabits on the Neo Geo; Takara; animals and distance; “relies more on counter attacks”; the locked swords).
  • The Official Neo Geo Newsletter issue 4, May 1993, p. 4: SNK’s preview (see SNK).
  • Edge issue 135, April 2004, arcade news: SNK Playmore’s move to Atomiswave (see Neo Geo).
  • Sega Retro, “Samurai Shodown” (web, secondary): the story and setting; the characters and their backgrounds; locking weapons, disarming and breaking, the POW or rage gauge, slow motion, the Kuroko referee and the courier; the differences between the Mega Drive, Mega-CD, Super NES and 3DO versions. https://segaretro.org/Samurai_Shodown
  • Wikipedia, “Samurai Shodown (1993 video game)” (web, secondary): release dates; the Gamest awards for 1993; the ports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samurai_Shodown_(1993_video_game)
  • “Samurai Shodown has a PS4 and Xbox One release date”, Game Informer, 14 May 2019 (web, secondary), and Wikipedia, “Samurai Shodown (2019 video game)”: the 2019 game and its later Switch and PC releases. https://gameinformer.com/2019/05/14/samurai-shodown-has-a-ps4-and-xbox-one-release-date

See also

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