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The Spirit of the Samurai – Review

Digital Mind Games is a studio that doesn’t just do video game development, as their 3D animation is also used for movies, ad campaigns, and even documentaries. But The Spirit of the Samurai is one of their first bigger projects, a full-length action-adventure game filled with Japanese folklore and sword fighting. If you enjoy the Edo period and creepy monsters, this game seems like a treat. But no matter how badly we wanted to enjoy it, The Spirit of the Samurai has too many glaring mistakes to really become a good game. Story The Spirit of the Samurai rotates you between three different characters. There is the noble samurai Takeshi, his pet kitten Chisai, and a small spirit known as Kodama. Takeshi can communicate with spirits himself and is warned by them that a dangerous demon is on its way to wreak havoc on humankind. Expecting this to happen eventually, Takeshi and the town he lives in have been preparing to fight off waves of various mythical creatures for decades. Though the fight will by no means be easy. The game has a pretty basic storyline that is engaging enough to drive forward the different combat sections. However, the sheer amount of cutscenes starts to feel a bit overbearing. Almost every single segment of the game is tied together with an animated cutscene, some of them only a couple of seconds long, but every time they grind the pace to a halt with needing to load in, and the graphics look vastly different. Graphics Speaking of graphics, we will say that the game does look great. The aforementioned cutscenes are made in the Digital Mind Games’ Telltale 3D style inspired by stop-motion animation. This means they look really nice, even if they don’t look anything like the main game itself. We’d have loved it if, instead of getting a hundred short cutscenes, we got only a few lengthier ones. For the main gameplay, Spirit of the Samurai becomes a sidescroller where you move across the screen left and right. There is a lot of depth in the layered environments, though the clutter does sometimes make it hard to see what’s in the background and what isn’t. However, the attention to detail in every location you visit was also something that gave the setting of the game a lot of extra charm. Sound Spirit of the Samurai has a decent soundtrack with traditional Japanese instruments. We very much enjoyed the music and the variety of the tracks, particularly during the boss battles. Audio cues are sometimes used during combat, which were all integrated well. The game is also fully voiced by a skilled English voice cast. Or you can listen to the other dubbed versions if you prefer that. Overall, we have no complaints. Gameplay Spirit of the Samurai is a side-scrolling action-adventure game with a focus on combat and some horror elements. You will spend the largest chunk of the time as Takeshi, a skilled sword master. You can attack by simply slicing at enemies, though doing so while pressing another button will result in various combos and attack types. You can also dodge or roll to get behind enemies, and parry any incoming blows. If you parry with perfect timing, this temporarily stuns your opponent. If you don’t want to get up close and personal, arrows will do the trick. And you can heal during combat if you have the right items for it. Every enemy killed will reward you with EXP, which will level up your character and unlock a few new combos. If all of this sounds familiar, that’s probably because this game uses rather basic mechanics as its main gameplay. The two other characters – Chisai and Kodama – function practically the same, with the addition of some platforming. We won’t say Spirit of the Samurai is bad for using familiar concepts, but we spent most of the game waiting for something more interesting to be introduced. Boss battles are kind of bland in terms of gameplay, as they are very often just enemies with more health. And while the different enemies you fight look cool, they never introduce new challenges. To complicate matters, the most glaring issue is that The Spirit of the Samurai doesn’t run great. Whenever a cutscene needs to load in (which, as mentioned, is pretty often), this can take a hot second. After about half an hour of gameplay, we suddenly encountered a bug where pressing the sprint button made the game crash. This could only be resolved by starting the save file over. Overall, we find that this game had too many small glitches to be released as a full-priced title, though we will comment that the devs are releasing patches for the game still. Conclusion No matter how badly we want to like The Spirit of the Samurai, it’s a slightly bland mixture of broken mechanics with some cool visuals, and nothing that blows us away. We like the graphic style and that the game dared to add horror elements, but it just doesn’t weigh up against the repetitive combat, the constant cutscenes, and the overall lack of charm.