Samurai Shodown II Arcade Review

Almost forgot to post this one here! Neo-Geo Month Continues with one of the console's most popular fighting game, Samuari Shodown II! This game was a huge hit in the arcades and it even got it's own dedicated cabinet which is REALLY nice, but I've never seen one in person.

If you listened to the "4 Bright Buttons" episode of the Podcast you'll hear how I spoke about the first game being HUGELY popular in my local arcade, well the sequel gave us what we wanted. More fighters, more moves and a really, REALLY poor translation that you can't help but love.

The thing about this series is it doesn't play like many other fighters where their all about scoring huge chain combos. It plays almost like a real sword fight. Where if you score a heavy attack you'll take off a huge chunk of damage to your opponent. It's really slow, but if you can pull off one it's so satisfying.

SNK changed the series up a bit with the last few games that had some more focus on combos. While I like some of the added characters I still come back to the tried and true gameplay of the SSII. I'd say my second favorite is the final game in the Neo-Geo series and the last official game released on the system, Samurai Shodown V: Special. That game took what the fifth game had and perfected it with some gruesome fatalities that for some reason ended up being toned down and the game had to be recalled to "fix" the issues. 

It's a great series and well worth checking out, but as Sarge and I would say, STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THE SEN ON THE XBOX 360! It's like SNK/Playmore took a huge shit into a DVD case, slapped the Samuari Shodown name on it and put it in stores for 60 bucks. It's a disgrace to a once great series.