A while back a friend of mine introduced me to the Samurai Champloo anime series. I thought it was exceedingly weird, and couldn't really get into it because the "plot" was heavily forced, the "we're constantly starving" thing had been done to death already in Cowboy Bebop, I thought Mugen was a complete waste of a character, and the series' opening theme is the the hallmark of Poser Rap and why it sucks. (Seriously, Vanilla Ice, Bubba Sparxx and even Onyx would have passed on recording this track. Sean Paul would have probably agreed, though.)
I never finished the first season and cast it to the recesses of my mind that are cluttered with stuff I don't care for. As if by clockwork, the Forces of the Universe conspire to drag these things out from the dusty corners and back into the forefront. I recognize an avatar someone has from another forum, someone in our forums makes a thread about how the second season of Samurai Champloo is actually quite engaging, unlike the first, and I get email from Namco-Bandai's PR people telling me that "Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked" is shipping.
I figured if the game was anywhere near as weird as the series...it might actually work as a game.
Story
In the quick intro, the narrator gives you the Cliff's Notes version of the game. Mugen, Jin are samurai wandering the streets of Edo. Dumb luck turns them from combatants into comrades, as well as traveling companions for Fuu, who is searching for a samurai who smells of sunflowers. They have no money, and are constantly slaughtering people who get in their way, or more than likely, kidnap Fuu. You'll take control of Jin, Mugen, or an unlockable third character as the group cuts a path to Nagasaki.
Gameplay
This game plays basically the same as any 3D sword based brawler released in the last 5 years. You've got your character, Square is your light attack button, Triangle in strong attack, X is jump, and O is your "technique" button. You mow down tons of enemies, and progress along your way.
However, if you get into it a little, you'll find a lot more variety in Samurai Champloo than most other run of the mill, "you against the combined Mongol hordes"-type beat 'em ups. You've got combos that work on the same principle as the Aldana swordfighting school from 7th Sea. It's all based on music and rhythm. As you start the game, you have two tracks to listen to. The right analog joystick switches between the two tracks, and they determine what you can link in your combos. You can see which button press you're on at any time, making this system far more useful than playing the game with a FAQ or strategy guide beside you.
As you gain money and clear more levels you can purchase more music, and set up the combos and songs to your liking. One of the concerns to take into account is represented in the form of a little red box on the guide. If you take the combo path to that move and connect, that final hit will put your character into Hyper Mode, a mode where you do a lot more damage, and gain a lot more money. So, you make want to take advantage of this by equipping one song with a longer main combo track, and a second one that has a quicker Hyper Move for different situations.
After you've killed off a significant number of bad guys, you'll raise your Tension Gauge to max. A bit after that your little Danceman icon in the lower left will get a star above his head. Hit the enemy that has the star above their head when this occurs, and you'll go into Tate Mode. At this point, you become an Office Linebacker, and...oh wait, wrong Tate. You'll go into a button press sequence where you first have to hit whichever button appears on the screen, and then pound all four face buttons as fast as possible to try and get over 100. How long you have to do this is based off of how many hit combos you're doing and how many enemies you've slain. If you get over 100, you'll go into a silhouetted room where music that sounds creepily like the music from those Dancing Old Man Six Flags commercials. This is Slash Mode, and in it, you can attempt to kill 100 enemies before all your life tokens go away. Kill 100 and you'll unlock something cool in the game. Fail to get 100, and you'll just unlock something lame in the Gallery.
That's pretty much the basic mechanics. The game will start to get repetitive after a bit, but that's kind of the nature of these games. The story moves along at a decent clip, and even though there isn't a whole lot to do outside of the main “killing tons of enemies” portion of the game, there are little distractions you can do, mostly, just to marvel at how weird all this stuff is.
Graphics
In terms of presentation, everything in Samurai Champloo reeks of the series' crazy style. The characters in 3D manage to hold a pretty good resemblance to their 2D counterparts, with the exception of the intro, where Fuu and Mugen look horribly incorrect. The game doesn't slow down much, but that's probably more a result of the fact that there can't be more than 4 enemies on screen at any given time rather than the swiftness of the game's engine.
What Samurai Champloo lacks in polys and textures, it makes up for with weirdness. You get weird transitional effects as you go from cutscene to combat. The loading screens change for each level, and each one is topically weird. One of the levels, a trip inside Mugen's subconscious, is a whacked-out 2D Super Mario Bros. Knock-off. Even the endings of boss fights have their own mad touch, displaying the name of the boss you killed, and a silhouette that fades out as cherry blossoms drift by. I'm not sure whether to be creeped out, impressed, or calling the illegal narcotics tip line in Japan.
Audio
The audio is also brimming with unorthodox style. When you pick up a beneficial power-up, the game will play the door chimes from the Japanese train stations. Every action or screen prompt has some weird sound associated with it.
The fighting effects themselves aren't really weird, but also get high marks. The soundtrack, ranges from pretty rocking to bland, but since you basically get to choose which tracks you want to be listening to, you can easily filter out what you don't want to hear.
The voice actors do a competent job, which is more than I can say from the crappy opening rap, which is reused from the TV series. For shame. There are some time where continuity is a bad thing. You don't really want to tie the image of the series to that song. Trust me on this.
Gripes
My first and only real gripe is monkeys. Monkeys are lame, despite what our own WhiteRoseDuelist and his evil Monkey Agenda would have you believe. I find monkeys these days are basically the physical embodiment of penis and fart jokes. They were probably funny back in the 60s and 70s for a couple seconds, but now they're just hackneyed. So, I object to the fact that there are monkeys in this game as an enemy, although that does mean I got to slaughter a bunch of them. My real problem with the monkeys in this game is the same problem I had with the sword wielding undead dogs in Shinobi...namely that they block! If you're going to have an enemy in the game that obviously has no possible means of defense, don't give it a block, it's just stupid. It's not difficult to write the AI script for those enemies to be different so that they can't block attacks. If you want to make them difficult, just make them harder to hit, but don't insult the gamer by expecting them to believe that this monkey with a sword in its mouth blocked your katana, when you would have cleaved through half of its skull before your blade contacted anything resembling a block.
Some of the boss fights and on-screen prompts were a bit lacking. One of the areas wanted me to do a wall bounce. But I couldn't get it to happen, since I kept pushing the direction I wanted to bounce on the left analog stick. Apparently, I was just supposed to let go of the direction, and double tap X. Another boss requires that you kill him basically 4 times with the same health bar. You've got no idea if you're doing something wrong or not until you finally get the prompt for what you're supposed to do to finish him off. It's just not very intuitive.
Overall
I would say that Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked is a pretty nifty game for a weekend. For the most of us this is a rental, but I'd actually recommend a purchase to people who liked the first season of the series, just because this game is so faithful to the weird vision of the show, that you'd probably think it would be worth having in your collection. For everyone else, the gameplay's longwinded and similar enough that you're likely to pass on playing through the other character's missions, much less the unlockable third character. However, this is one of those games that while beatable on a weekend rental, is solid enough that the excess of strangeness means you'll probably have an enjoyable time with it, and crack a smile while playing through at least once.
