Samurai Shodown Sen

Samurai Shodown Sen is a 3D incarnation of SNK's famed Samurai Shodown series released exclusively in Japanese Arcade cabinets in 2008 and on Xbox 360 in 2010 to compete with Street Fighter IV. The game features 11 completely new fighters and 13 fan-favorite returning veterans. Sen takes the series away from its 2D roots as SNK tries its hand at the 3D fighting game once again. The first time the Samurai Shodown series went 3D (with Samurai Shodown 64 & Samurai Shodown 64: Warriors Rage) it received mixed reviews (mostly bad), and Sen has indeed brought a similar result.

To state the obvious, the new 3D gameplay system is vastly different from what players of the classic Samurai Shodown games know and love. Air combos & sidestepping have been introduced, along with horizontal & vertical slashing techniques. To be honest, Sen seems to want to play more like Soul Calibur or Tekken than the likes of Samurai Shodown. Even from a design standpoint, the new characters introduced in Sen seem to fill in the missing (and painfully cliché) archetypes of the Samurai Shodown series... making it seem eerily familiar to Soul Calibur. As far as the newcomers go, a few are pretty cool, but most are sickeningly generic and just don't have the excitement and "swag" of the original cast.

The control scheme remains a 4-button setup, with the ability to perform special commands by pressing two or three buttons at once, like in the prequels. The Rage Explosion & Fatal Flash techniques have also returned, but don't seem to mesh all that well with the new gameplay engine. A new "deflect" system is also in place which is similar to parrying to Soul Calibur, offering a good defensive mechanic to the gameplay engine. The downside? It's a very far cry from that of Soul Calibur's. The POW Meter also returns and builds up after your character takes damage, as usual. The 24-character-strong roster is fairly impressive at a glance, but most character move sets definitely lack depth. The way the movements are laid out also demands a lot of experimenting on the player's part, and there's no in-game tutorial or mission mode of any sort to help players through the learning curve.

Sadly, the disappointments continue. Samurai Shodown Sen suffers from some horribly stiff animations and rather unresponsive/slow controls. Moving along, there are no fireballs in the game, and moves that used to travel across the whole screen are now short-ranged attacks. While I can respect drastic "change" from an artistic perspective in some instances, certain changes just don't work out in the end. (Samurai Shodown not having projectiles is one of them). Furthermore, characters that were always well-known for their animal sidekicks fighting by their side (like Galford & Nakoruru), now fight alone.

Sen's graphics are also slacking and to make matters worse, they're over 2 years old (at the time of the Xbox 360 version's release). Character models are very averagely detailed and there are also the "dark, dim, and/or hazy" stages that fail to impress for the most part. On that note, the weird "dark" shadowing and lighting in the graphics engine seem to be an attempt at intentionally masking the insufficiently rendered character models, poor character anatomy, and polygonal clipping. In a nutshell, Sen can't compete with the current 3D fighters in terms of graphics, nor does it hold a candle to the classic 2D Samurai Shodown games.

Fatalities have returned in Sen and are the most graphic & gruesome the series has ever seen, warranting an "M" rating for the title. Heads and limbs will fly off at the end of the battle if a perfect is scored, leaving your character a bloody mess and/or groveling in pain like Mortal Kombat.

The home version of Sen, includes Arcade, Versus, Survival, Practice, and Online battle. Overall, the game is a bit short on features and modes. Story Mode is short on depth and production value, for one. Online play is fairly smooth and also allows for replay saves.

Samurai Shodown would continue to use 3D features later at Samurai Shodown (2019), which finally made success.