Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword (3DS)
It’s a scene that’s played out in many samurai films. The samurai stands poised with their hand on the hilt of their sheathed blade, eyes locked on their opponent watching for any hint of movement. The enemy moves to strike, and in a flash, the blade is drawn, the foe sliced through in one dramatic strike. Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword, also known as Hana Samurai: Art of the Sword in Europe, builds its entire experience around these quick draw scenarios, and while it needs to make some adjustments to how durable foes are and how the scene unfolds to make this broadened concept work, it still focuses on moving just enough to evade the enemy’s weapon so you can strike back with your own.
Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword begins with its hero, an unnamed samurai, visiting a shrine and hearing the voice of a kappa. Long ago Princess Cherry Blossom was kidnapped, causing discord and conflict all across the Land of the Rising Sun. Believing this samurai to have the potential to finally rescue her, the kappa blesses him with the Sakura Sword, a strong blade that creates a flourish of flower petals when it strikes a foe that perhaps not coincidentally serve as a stand-in for the kind of blood spray you might see in a typical samurai duel. From there, the hero sets out to fight everyone in his way on the journey to find the captured princess, many of the fights unfolding in a fairly similar manner due to their root in that earlier mentioned classic scene.
The world map consists of a series of short levels you enter where a group of weapon-wielding thugs will accost you. Depending on their weapon choice and design, your opponents will try to attack you in a specific manner, the player needing to watch carefully for the moment they can dodge the foe’s attack and then land a slash or two of their own. Early on in the hills and bamboo forests you’ll encounter mostly men wielding katanas and long blades, their tells not too hard to glean and thus you can start to figure out the general flow of how a fight is meant to go. If you try to strike a foe normally they’ll block your attacks and potentially even counterattack, so you need to watch, wait, and react. An enemy will indicate their intent to attack you with a yellow starburst over their head and then the trail of their weapon can be colored differently to show if they will strike once or continue unleashing attacks for a bit, and you’ll always remain with your attention locked on whoever is attacking you unless you choose to manually disengage if you wish to run away or perhaps collect the cash and rare healing hearts they drop.
As you reach new levels you’ll begin to encounter warriors who attack in harder to predict ways and foes will learn to perform feints to try and bait out a dodge. The timing can become rather tight or you’ll need to find specific openings rather than just hopping to the side or backwards and then attacking, but slipping up can be quite damaging. Your health will increase every two levels you complete but the thugs you encounter often come in groups, meaning you’ll need to take down a whole gang before you get credit for clearing the stage and can move on. Despite introducing bowmen and spearmen along the way, Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword’s total count for unique normal enemies is quite low, which leads to a bit of an interesting issue. If you learn how to overcome an enemy type, it’s often just a matter of getting your dodge timing right, stages sometimes feeling like a test to see if you’ll slip up in familiar situations rather than introducing new scenarios. You can at least take some time to learn a new enemy type when they appear, the samurai packing a guard option that invalidates most danger, but it does diminish the strength of your blade.
On the bottom screen a selection of items are shown, this inventory being a group of items you can utilize whenever you like in a fight. Food is used for healing, a frog can distract an enemy so you can move in and get some free hits without the fuss of avoiding their attacks, and kunai can be thrown to hit foes from long range, a useful trick for enemies like the bowmen or ninjas who try to keep their distance. The last item you can utilize is a whetstone, this tying into the blade durability system that punishes you for sloppy play. Strike an enemy’s guard or defend against their attacks and your weapon will weaken, and while the meter displaying the blade’s condition looks pretty rough as the sword goes from pristine to filled with notches, your weapon isn’t actually at risk of breaking. Instead, its attacks weaken, so a foe that might normally take two hits to take out instead will take four. You can conserve your whetstones then if you’re fine putting in extra time, and in some levels like the boss stages where there is first a bit of a gauntlet against their goons, it can be wise to keep your resources for the harder fight at the end. However, acquiring more items can be a bit of a chore at first.
There are small villages dotted around the world of Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword, and these are where you can purchase more inventory or do things like forge your sword to increase its strength. Money is handed out in pretty small amounts though, the player likely to earn only a single coin from taking out a goon when something like a whetstone costs ten and forging can reach a hundred later in the journey. There are alternate ways to earn cash than simply killing enemies though. Dodge your foes enough and you’ll infuriate them, making them drop more coins, and by consistently dodging attacks without being hit, you can earn Precision Points. The shopkeeper will pay you proportionally for how high your unbroken streak is when you reach him, and in the town there are minigames like watermelon slicing and cutting falling leaves you can play where they can have cash payouts or provide useful items. The minigames do tap into one of the game’s small issues though, the player not often giving an indicator for when something is in their blade’s reach. Since the minigames only reward perfect slashes, you have to learn through experimentation while spending valuable cash, and while you can earn new special attacks by completing enough of these, the learning process of when a vertically falling fruit is exactly in the right spot makes it a discouraging prospect whose rewards aren’t significant enough to be worth the effort.
It turns out though, the best way to earn money is to die. If you fail a level, the samurai will be reduced to three hearts, meaning unless you go and heal at somewhere like an inn, retrying a level could likely lead to your death since many attacks already deal two hearts. However, coming back from a loss causes the kappa to appear somewhere on the map, the player able to visit the level he stands next to for a money-making opportunity. The level will play out in the same way as before, but every goon you defeat will drop an incredible amount of cash, meaning repeated failures will be the best way to afford things like weapon upgrades or some very useful tools at the shop like a free revive at half health or an invisible robe the invalidates a surprising amount of incoming attacks before disappearing. In fact, this system’s generosity can likely lead to a way to overcome more difficult levels, where a failure leads to you going to stock up on some goods that can make some levels a cakewalk after you’ve bought all the items and upgrades you can. Luckily, some foes like the final boss can still put up an intense fight that is satisfying to overcome, but some of the bosses before him aren’t too much of a step up from the normal foes. They can take more damage and will more often rely on things like multiple strikes in a row to test you, but there are only three boss battles in total in this small adventure.
The balance in Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword thus feels like it’s in an odd spot. Blocking is very effective but you’ll need good reflexes to dodge and actually have your openings to land strikes. You face the same handful of normal enemies over and over again so you can learn them, but their repeat appearances are mostly just to see if you’re consistent with only a few feints added to their repertoire to change them up. You can offset the difficulty with goodies you buy at the village store, but they can sometimes be too helpful and the kappa’s appearance can make getting money a bit too easy. When the battle system is working well though it can certainly be a satisfying show of skill as you zip around foes and slash them apart with ease, but some of the wind comes out of your sails as things feel a touch repetitive even if you don’t go hunting for money. You do gradually unlock some battle challenges where you need to take down a set amount of thugs with the goal being to do so quickly, your items and even health limited in these special challenges so they are real tests of what you’ve actually learned. There’s also a rock garden where you can grow some cherry trees and decorate it based on the amount of real world steps you take with your 3DS in your pocket, it serving more as a nifty extra since it doesn’t impact the main game. These are nice additional features, but they don’t really tip the scales in a game that feels like it needed more true variety in the core action rather than extra activities.
THE VERDICT: While a somewhat short adventure, Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword still feels like it strains what could have been incredibly satisfying swordplay. Learning a new foe’s method of attack and overcoming them is an enjoyable task at first, but the small handful of enemy types you face are repeated a bit too much without them really developing enough new tricks to justify such frequent appearances. It can feel at times more an endurance test, something that can require item purchases to offset and thus a bit more repetition as you drum up money, but there are still some strong highs like overcoming the difficult final battle or fluidly carving through a gang of goons that provide some rewarding payoffs to your efforts.
And so, I give Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword for Nintendo 3DS…
An OKAY rating. Some enemy repetition wouldn’t have done too much damage to Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword, especially since it could ensure players learn how to overcome a foe instead of just relying on tools like the frog to simplify a fight, but too often do you enter a level that has just thrown together another batch of the same foes you’ve learned to overcome to see if your reflexes are still sharp. Repeating some enemies wouldn’t even be too bad so long as they had more consistently novel allies to make the fights feel different, but adding a few feints or having the foe vary up how many times they swing before they are vulnerable doesn’t exactly add new life to how you face them. The journey being somewhat short even when you factor in failures and potential money grinding helps to prevent the normal battles from becoming bland and modes like the time attacks actually show that an injection of a new consideration can add an interesting bit of pressure even to reused content. Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword should have definitely focused more on variety over quantity, although still the number of boss battles is surprisingly lacking for a battle system where they could have been the highlight. In some ways this game can feel a bit like a rough draft for something more promising, like how the minigames at town often require you to time your slash on vertically falling objects perfectly and yet this only really crops up during battle if you choose to slice the bombs ninja throw rather than moving away in a much easier way to avoid trouble. When a new danger arises or a tense situation unfolds, there are sparks of excitement that keep Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword alive, but those needed to arise more consistently if the game wished to keep the player constantly engaged rather than sometimes going through the motions to clear away their opposition.
Taking the classic quick draw samurai duel and stretching it out into an adventure wasn’t a failure of an idea, but it was certainly one the team behind Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword needed some more work to realize. There are many games about identifying your foe’s attack patterns, dodging, and striking, Punch-Out!! to Dark Souls leaning heavily on such concepts, but the right mix of novelty and difficulty is key to keeping up the excitement and satisfaction in overcoming a tough foe. Perhaps because it is a downloadable title an effort was made to make a small amount of content last a decent amount of time, and while the action can be sharp when the right factors come together, unfortunately over time this game can start to wear down just like its hero’s petal-producing blade.