SHOGUN WARRIORS
Original Release: Kaneko, 1992, Arcade
Something of a proto Samurai Shodown, eight Japanese warriors battle it out for some reason or another
Shogun Warriors (Arcade, Kaneko, 1992)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: Arcade Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Shogun Warriors is oddly reminiscent of a bunch of SNK stuff that actually came out after it. It beat Samurai Shodown to market in using feudal Japanese culture and lore with weaponry as its central theme (though this one apparently takes place in modern times, given the backgrounds and the mechanized cyber-samurai, a mix that also calls to mind Sengoku). It has kinda the chunky look and feel of the first World Heroes, which it beat by about three months. It even has the difficulty of a vintage SNK fighting game, with the default computer ruthless and all over your ass from the first match.
There's good reason why it was overlooked in the post-Street Fighter 2 flood of clones, however. It's slow and just not particularly good, and difficult to come to grips with. Special moves do much more damage than any kind of regular blow, so the game is kinda about spamming them as much as possible. The CPU gives you little opportunity to come to grips with the inputs and timing, however, just mercilessly charging you with its own special move spam from the start of the first match. And having to mash and wiggle the stick to escape grapples just rubbed me the wrong way.
The aesthetics don't help either. The characters are all kinda weirdly drawn in a distended style with out of proportion limbs, the worst offender being the supposedly sexy geisha girl. The music is OK; some tracks are really pretty decent, but they're all very short. The sound work is interesting in that the World version was given an English dub with expectedly bad voice work, that's often so mushmouthed you can't even really make out what's being said. Animations are also very basic and choppy sometimes, most notably when you grab someone.
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