Technically this is a re-write, because i did review this game years and years ago in italian, but time gave me the distance needed to realize i could actually write an entirely new review from scratch for Seven Samurai 20XX still based on my experience of like 7 plus years ago, since the hatred i felt for this one never actually went away, and i guess festered on the back of my mind.
But i did replay it, and i can futher confirm that there are indeed many reasons to istinctually hate it, if nothing else for the fact it had the brass balls of being the closest to an actual videogame adaptation of Kurosawa’s seminal samurai film, as it actually had the rights by the Kurosawa production, and i wanna make it clear it also has Moebius (yes, THAT Moebius) as the character designer and music by another legend, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.
So yeah, it’s kinda impressive how Sammy (an arcade publisher that by the early 2000s fused with Sega in order to enter the home console videogame market, which i will always associate with my beloved Metal Slug clone called Dolphin Blue) got permits from the film studios, rounded up people of incredible caliber from different industries, and then managed to deliver such an obvious, steaming turd that was destined to haunt the 5 bucks bargain bins for a good decade.
So much for a product meant to celebrate the movie’s 50th anniversary, as it did the anime series Samurai Seven, both curiously fiddling with sci-fi re-imaginings of the film but actually unrelated to each other besides both meant to attract younger audiences to Kurosawa’s story.
It’s not even like we start on a good note, since the story ultimately is so remaigined and passed through various degrees of “animefication” but mostly the fact – as the title alludes to – it takes the Seven Samurai storyline into the far future of…. somewhere this centhury, at this point in time.
But wait, it’s a cyberpunk future… a cyberpunk AND fantasy future, because there are two genders in the future: Humans and Humanoids. The latters being basically cyborgs, space werewolves, mutants, with these working as the bandits in the original film by being the main antagonistic force, and the villagers of a huge city taking the place of the farmers, as they are attacked by the “humanoid bandits” and ask help from some wandering samurai.
There is a bit more as there is a thin balance between the two sides upholded by a girl that acts as the “Child Of Heaven”, but at the end you spent a lot more time in this “tubular” sci fi city than the village, and aside from characters that bring the namesake of the ones from the movie (like good ol’ Benkei) and-or serving to recite quotes from the film, there’s very little in common.
Before, i hated the storyline and remade plot because i thought it was utter crap and an insult to the source material, in retrospect i still think it’s fuckin stupid, full of convoluted bullshit and that has you feel like the game it’s holding out a reveal or some important info about certain character or subplot… even they don’t, and it all feels rushed, so it’s impossible to predict if some of the random bullshit will actually mean something in the grand scheme, or if it is yet another flash in the pan, so it’s hard to even know if you should care about something or someone, not that’s there proper time spent to characterize these people and build actual sense of connection or caramaderie.
… plus the plot still has barely anything to do with Seven Samurai, aside from the obvious general concept, but it’s hard to parse through some random shits like werewolves, robots, a cyborg version of Shock Troopers’ villain, and the hip-hop skateboarding twins that pop up out of nowhere only for you to fight them. Makes about sense how this alleged remake of Seven Samurai seems kinda determined to be everything but about the Seven Samurai, it has his prioreties like inserting subplot about getting injected and turning into devil dragons.
Maybe i would be less harsh if they did bother to channel the themes and spirit of the movie, but nope, it’s all focused on a lone wolf that actually remains lone in actual gameplay, Natoe, the other samurais (or most people) are not playable and conveniently somewhere else in every story moment, so fuck your communion of intent and honor, there’s no attempt at grace or smart fighting, and fuck any attempt at making the story cutscenes connect to the gameplay ones.
Because here you could literally see a supercut splicing the story cutscenes together on Youtube and not really miss anything of importance, so much gameplay and narration are detatched, and of course there’s plenty of that “winning the fight only to lose, fail or die in a cutscene” bullshit, so unthethered the gameplay and narration are from each other, divorced even.
Though i do recommend watching these cutscenes, because sometimes they’re so bad or so terribly dubbed with a comedic slant it’s hilarious, and if nothing else the Final Fantasy-esque character designs are kinda interesting, wish they were in a game with gameplay or characters worth caring about, while the Ryuichi Sakamoto composed soundtrack is….. kind of a lie, he actually composed just the opening and ending tracks, most of the soundtrack during the actual gameplay is techno stuff and clearly not composed by Sakamoto, come on.
Gameplay is some of the most senseless shit i’ve ever played, even to this day, especially because, despite being flashy but lacking any depth, it’s still a lot more convoluted than it should, as it tries to be different when it can’t even get basic mechanics rights, as even the simple act of attacking is utter shit, sloppy, imprecise, slow, and lacking any kind of reasonable combo system, one that actually works in reality, one when it doesn’t actually come down to just inane and boring button bashing, they couldn’t even bother to do a basic light and heavy attack systems where you string together those for different combo attacks. Not even that.
Sure, you can scroll in the submenu and see “Abilities” and what would be a move list, which differentiates and gives the moves some flowery names but it’s all window dressing, a farce, a joke, as the comand inputs for the combo are unreliable, and most often than not combos have such a bad auto-targetting they will put you out of reach of the very same enemies you’re trying to kill, or leave you open during the sloppy and morass-like animations you’ve trapped yourself in.
Yes, these combos do exist, but – again- due to them requiring mashing the same button anyway (sometimes inserting directional inputs before or alongside the attack) and the controls being kinda imprecise and stiff, you’ll most likely do these by pure accident, so no point learning any of them.
There are some RPG elements in the sense you can improve attack, defense and HP at the end of every level and you can see the stats, but that and the collecting swords by just defeating bosses and progressing through the story, that’s literally it.
Instead of actually fixing or improving the combat, they figured to have an energy bar for blocking (which is also an ability/feature donned to the boss enemies), which sounds neat in theory, but it just boils down to holding the button before the enemies even start attacking, with the bar regenerating way too fast, so even if offense or defense worked well, it doesn’t actually matter because there’s also absolutely zero balance to any of the combat, thanks in no small part to the berserk/rage mode, called Nitoh-Ryu here, where you fittingly sheath the second sword and have a minute to unleash flurries of rapid attacks before the mode runs off… and then also way too easily recharges itself, to the point why even bother with all these mechanics and systems that barely work.
For example, there is an emphasis on timing your sidestep, attack or parry in order to do a ninja step behind the enemy, anticipate the enemy aattack or launch a counter move, but the controls are ever o so slighty unreliable and the animations so stiff that often you see the game telegraphing you doing one of these timed counter manouvers…. only to not actually do them because the attacks just moved you out of the right zone or split second time window for it to activate, so it fails.
I complain, but at least in “Ronoroa Zoro Laughs At You” mode the attacks actually have some semblance of enjoyment to them, since you can slash robots and humanoid monster thingies fast and almost zip through the crowds… when the auto-targeting and everything else doesn’t fail you because Mercury was in retrograde that fraction of a second, or the game wasn’t looking, sometimes literally so as the camera is awful, you can’t control it with the right analog stick and they didn’t care to even give you a mini-map on the HUD, not even that, but with the enemy IA being mostly MIA and the constant, frequent framerate issues that have the game slow to a crawl with even not that many enemies on screen… the flaws almost cancel each other out, in a way.
Combat it still a utterly boring, miserable experience, but it’s a slightly less miserable experience.. for the minute lasts each time, but don’t think the variety of weapons you acquire from beating bosses or founding them in chests helps, because the game also doesn’t tell you that indeed you can equip different weapons to the right and left hands… after you beat the game, that is.
So much i realized this only now, replaying it years after beating the game, that you can even do that, but then again, why only unlock it as post-game feature, or why bother when it does not matter one bit, so much that you’re never told the stats for the weapons, no no, let’s just give the player some useless info dump about the weapon instead of why one should even bother changing the base weapons with the ones found around, because they don’t really change shit to any significant degree, so yeah, i guess let them use the weapons mounted on the fodder robots or the DARK BLADE (TM), it doesn’t change shit either way, it’s always a gaggle of monotone fights that are always easy, so naturally the game forces you to exploit its own few systems, that it’s all a matter of attriction, even with the usual cheap shots these shitty games love to throw at the player, it’s all so piss easy.
Even more senseless than the combat is the “exploration”, as in this one of those cases where they should have made this just a succession of linear enviroments and encounters, like, straight up all corridors instead being mostly corridors and rooms with only one possible exit, which it is.. until the game decides it’s time for you to deal with confusing, directionless mini-hubs (like the village and the city center) that are almost on par with the confusing “hospital & cave mazes” of the first two Oneechanbara games, mini hubs that would be a nice change of pace, if they weren’t so huge, empty and devoid of things to do, besides talking to some NPCs for the sake of chatting, which might be a way to trigger some of the secret bosses, but it’s all still so pointless.
How the two things can co-exist is nothing short of a miracle, because yes, the map (helps to have a map) often tells you where to go in the small area with usually one door or path to take, and even highlights the exit pathway with a huge Crazy Taxi style arrow on the floor, just in case.
In terms of presentation and graphics, the game looks good for the era, the cutscenes (especially the CG rendered ones) look quite good as well, make no mistake, this is far from a low budget production, shame that perfomance can be shoddy, with the game chugging when too many enemies are on screen, and load times are indeed “a load”, could be shorter.
Plus, it’s also lacking any real reason to replay it, you could technically do a run on Hard difficulty, but who cares, and technically there’s a new game plus… i guess in order to get some of the useless weapons you didn’t get the first time around. And some secret bosses that – as said before – are hidden in some of the few “open exploration” hub sections. No co-op. No extras.
Well, to be honest, i did check and there’s supposedly a Survival mode and a Boss Rush mode, but the latter requires you to beat all bosses, including the secret ones, so that explains why it didn’t show up once i beat the game….not sure why Survival didn’t, but then again, i doubt anyone would bother to play it again or even bother to finish… despite it not being that time consuming, all things considered.
The shit cherry on top it’s that it’s also pathetically short, like 4/5 hours long, and yet could use to be half as long, not that it deserves to be even 2 hours long, since the ideas, challenges and content feels barren and recycled to vomiting inducing degrees, and it’s horrible, half baked content that should have been tossed out and redone from scratch, starting from the mindless, unreliable and boring as shit combat, instead dumping extra mechanics on top with the idea of balancing it out, but even these are so half baked they ultimately end up undoing any attempt at balance and instead incentivize you exploiting them in order to get done with the endlessly regurgitated encounters full of dumb enemies, shitty bosses.
I don’t joke when i mean the game feels incomplete and unfinished in terms of gameplay and its systems, even aside the hubs that are so huge and empty, suggesting there was meant to be a lot more to the game….it feels like a polished prototype upon which add balance, depth, refine, but which was instead barely worked on and sold as the finished game, it’s functional, it works as intended… despite the “intended” feeling indeed like a work in progress.
At least it’s worth watching the cutscenes on Youtube due to the Mobius character designs and the corny dialogues that often deliver some laughs, and despite it all, i don’t hate it. Not anymore.
It’s still terrible and devoid of fun, it often runs like ass, it’s pathetically short and linear (until it’s a confusing maze of directionless wandering in empty hub areas), and as a videogame remake meant to celebrate Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai on the film 50th anniversary feels like an apocryphal labour, but the sheer weird factor make it a primo curiosity, even more when they felt like they had to involve Mobius and Ryuichi Sakamoto (both rest in peace) in order to legitimatize the project.
As usual, Benkei’s said it best:
So again we are defeated. The farmers have won. Not us.
Wise Cafe (International) 