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   Company Namco ESRB Rating E for Everyone Release Date US - October 29, 2007 Controllers Wii Remote Classic Controller Gamecube Controller Wii Points 600  Review by: Corbie Dillard ©2008 Virtual-Turbo |
It would be a fair
statement to say that the TurboGrafx-16
system had a
wide range of platformers available for it. Some were great, some were
good, and some were Samurai Ghost. Some games have poor game play, some
have bad soundtracks, and some have poor level design. Think of Samurai
Ghost as a greatest hits package of all those bad characteristics
rolled up into one game. Other than some nice parallax scrolling and
some very large and detailed characters sprites, there's not much good
going on in this game. Why Namco even allowed this to be released is a
mystery, and as bad as this game was back when it was first released
for the TurboGrafx-16 system, it seems to have only gotten a lot worse
over time.
The game play in Samurai Ghost is all over the map. Your character has a number of sword swings he can make use of, unfortunately none of them are very effective or responsive. For instance, you can swing high to hit enemies overhead, use your regular swing to take out enemies in front of you, and even jump up and stab downward with your sword to take out bad guys below you. The only problem with this is that executing these moves is easier said than done, especially in a pinch when the action is becoming intense. The streaky hit detection doesn't help things along either. Half the time you'll take a hit before an enemy even touches you which generally kicks of a chain reaction of other enemies hits as you attempt to regroup. The only saving grace to the broken play control is the special power-ups. If you can manage to grab one of these it will power up your sword swing and greatly increases the range with which you can attack. The Metroid-style spin attack is especially helpful if you can find it, but only lasts a short time before the effect wears off. This is about the only time you can make any decent progress through some of the later levels. The downside is that these power-ups are few and far between. The level design is also rather bland and uninspired which makes the game little more than walking from side to side and performing a few mediocre platforming sections here and there. After all of this fun, you'll get to face off with a boss at the end of each area. This might sound fun, but most of these bosses don't offer much in the way of variation and most are beaten by merely walking up to them and hacking away. Of course that's if you can swing your sword faster than they can pummel you, which happens more often than not later in the game. Needless to say, the game play in Samurai Ghost is horrible and whoever was in charge of putting this game play system together should be delivering pizzas for a living by now. The visuals in the game vary. Some areas have great detail and depth whereas others look like they just stepped out of an early NES title. The multi-layer scrolling helps add depth, but many areas are so bland to begin with, the depth does little to help them look any better. The large character and enemy sprites are very detailed and animate well given their size, but up next to many of these mediocre backdrops, they tend to stick out like a sore thumb. The game seems to throw in a few good looking levels later on in the game, but reaching these later levels is so frustratingly difficult that many won't stick with this title long enough to have a chance to see any of them. Musically there are a few decent tracks in the game, but much like the visuals, they're watered down with arguably some of the absolute worst sound effects ever heard in a video game. Many of the sound effects sound like someone took a tiny speaker and pumped earth-shattering bass through it until it exploded. It's just a grating type of buzzing sound that really gets annoying quickly. It's obvious that the developers put about as much time and effort into the sound and music as they did the other areas of the game. It's tough to be this hard on a game, but it was nearly impossible to find one decent thing to say about a game that's pretty much substandard in just about every facet of the game. Samurai Ghost was terrible back when it was released on the TurboGrafx-16 system and it's still just as broken all these years later as it's released on the Virtual Console. There will inevitably be some gamers who will be able to deal with the many flaws this game offers up, but most people will find the mounting shortcomings too much to overcome to get any type of real enjoyment out of this game at all. |
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