The most I can say for Bushido Blade is that, despite the fact that I bought this PSX title in mid-1998, when I was a fresh-faced young lad in my freshman year of high school, it STILL gets pulled down every few months for some more play. Given that we live in an age where even most next-gen titles would be worthy of one playthrough, then a trip to the eBay listings (if that), that’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.
Bushido Blade, a side project of Squaresoft that was begun in the mid-1990s, sought to be an innovative and original fighting game. The game had a long and leisurely development cycle, but the end product, though not a gigantic seller, turned out to be an absolute gem of a game. You play as one of six characters of a secretive order of Japanese assassins (apparently set in the modern era; one non-playable character you’ll fight uses a gun, and the fight takes place in a modern cityscape). One of these six characters has defected from the order by trying to quit (conveniently enough, it’ll always be the one you play). Of course, secretive orders of Japanese assassins (most of whom don’t actually seem to be ninjas, surprisingly) tend not to like their membership levels dropping off, so the order sends the OTHER five characters off to kill you, plus a healthy number of non-playable bosses at the end. There are plenty of play modes besides the single player campaign, but we’ll get into those later.
However, this isn’t your ordinary fighting game. The most important twist of many is that this game does away completely with damage bars and instead tries to stay true to actual combat with a one hit, one kill system. In other words, if you get hit in a critical area ONCE, you are dead, round over, continue y/n? Critical areas include parts of the torso and the head, of course. Get hit anywhere else and you’ll suffer a corresponding disability for the rest of the fight. Take enough arm or hand damage and you won’t be able to use that hand to hold your weapon (and many of the weapons are two-handed, thus you’ll slow waaayy down). Get nicked up in non-critical torso areas, and you’ll weakly move along like a blood-loss patient. If you get slashed in the shin, you’re likely to drop, crippled, to one knee, shuffling along and defending yourself against your opponent’s attempts to finish you while still trying to sneak in attacks of your own. When both you and your opponent might be dispatched in a single cut, the game takes on a very interesting strategic dynamic that actually resembles real combat, unlike, say, Soul Caliber 2, which is a fine fighting game, of course, but I highly doubt that most individuals could be stabbed with a spear 12 times and still feel fine. Another highly unique twist to the game is that, in order to progress in the single player mode, you MUST fight with honor. What this means is that you cannot attack your opponent while they are speaking to you, you cannot attack them when they are lying down, you cannot blind them by throwing dirt/sand/snow in their eyes (which you CAN do if you’re feeling un-Bushidolike), you can’t hit them in the back, you can’t hit them when they’re running away/climbing a wall to get away from you, etc. Violating these rules causes the campaign to halt, and you’ll have to start it over again if you want to get to the end. However, following the rules isn’t really that difficult, and if you keep them in mind, you’ll find that the Bushido requirement is not frustrating.
That’s far from all, though. The game features eight weapons: The katana (basic Japanese samurai sword), saber (short version of the fencing blade of the same name), rapier (short version of the European duelist’s blade), sledgehammer (yes, sledgehammer), nodachi (HUGE Japanese curved sword), Naginata (10 foot-long oriental polearm), broadsword (think medieval Europe), and longsword (balanced western-style weapon). Amazingly, there is a different move list for each character for each weapon, and each of these move lists is divided into three stances, only one of which you can use at once. That gives you 48 different move lists, using only six playable characters. Now, to be sure, many of the weapons have moves common to each character, but the different characters, who themselves have different ratings for speed, power, etc., will add their own unique dynamic to the weapon you select, which makes the game incredibly deep, and certainly very replayable, especially since each character has a different story, unique relationships with the other characters, a different ending, etc.. All the characters also have a few special moves (not involving hadoken-like projectiles, just sweet combinations) that can only be used with specific weapons; consult your favorite FAQ source.
Then there’s the level design. Bushido Blade does 3D environments like they were meant to be done. Aside from the few levels on which you’ll fight the boss characters (which are generally open, flat levels with impassable borders on all sides and a few obstacles to run into), there is only one environment to fight it. However, it is GIGANTIC, so much so that the poor PSX has to divide it into sections that load up only when you run into a new one. There are about 20 of these different sections, all of which have unique and interesting layouts. You can fight in a shrine littered with stones and markers to keep you and your opponent on your toes, in a double-platformed, partially-destructible bamboo forest, in a pool, or you can fight on a bridge overlooking a canyon, and you can move between these 20 or so different sections of the same level at will, all while fighting the same opponent in the same match. Your opponent has to follow you, of course, but that’s no problem for this AI, which is actually quite cunning.
There are also a considerable number of play modes (real names not given here) other than the main single-player story mode. You also get a vs. mode, which you can use with a friend or with the AI, and a practice mode, which is just the vs. mode with weapons rendered with wooden skins and wood-like sound effects, plus a quick and automatic restart after each round. Also in there is an extremely interesting first person mode. The game remains the same, only the camera is plucked out of its usual angle and stuck right in your character’s face. It certainly adds an interesting dynamic when you have to read your opponent’s actions from head-on a few feet away rather than floating harmlessly above the battlefield. The first-person mode can only be played against the AI, since the game apparently has a vendetta against split-screening. If you were one of those folks who got the various rigging required to link two PSXes, then you can use that for a two-player version of the first person mode. Finally, you get the survival mode, which is absolutely the most interesting survival mode I’ve ever seen in any game. Your chosen character gets thrown in a narrow castle hallway with a katana, and must hack their way through 100 increasingly-difficult opponents. The difference between this and your ordinary fighting game survival mode, of course, is that if you make one mistake, even on opponent 99, you will die and have to start over. Or, if you suffer a leg injury on opponent 6, you will only have one good leg for the other 94 opponents, which can make things, to say the least, a bit more challenging. The multiplicity of play modes, along with the game’s already-flexible dynamic, makes for an extremely fun and highly-replayable game.
The game does have its flaws. The AI seems to fall in and out of predictability, making for occasional openings to exploit in your computer-controlled opponent’s defenses. Sometimes you’ll get a good challenge, sometimes not. Graphical clipping doesn’t always quite come together, and you’ll see things sticking out of other things with an unfortunate degree of frequency. There is a complete lack of music during most play modes, and I really think the ambiance of the game would have helped had it incorporated music to a greater degree. As it is, it gives the game a somewhat empty, albeit more realistic feel.
The graphics on the whole are above-par for the PlayStation. The environments are beautiful, the weapons are excellent, and the characters are surprisingly the weakest graphical part of the game. They’re not bad, but it seems that more effort went into making the characters’ move lists rather than making their polygons exceptionally pretty, something I have no problem with. The aforementioned clipping difficulties abound, however, and it’s the most serious problem the game has in visual terms.
The characters all speak in Japanese, with English subtitles. Voice acting is ok, but of course it’s hard to judge for the non-Japanese speaker. There are some pretty good Japanese-style tunes in the menu and in the survival mode, but in any other play mode, you get no music at all, as said above. The best feature of the audio are probably the plain old sound effects. Each weapon has a custom soundboard, and there are also very nice sounds for things like walking on sand, striking a tree or rock with your weapon, and even some pretty good “weapon cutting person” sounds.
With Amazon sellers selling never-before-used copies of the game for $10, there is no reason for any PSX or PS2 user with even a passing interesting in fighting games not to own this title, or its highly similar, yet hugely more expansive sequel, Bushido Blade 2. Your crisp new Hamilton will buy a game that will have a place on your shelf for a long time indeed.
