Review By

Daniel Weissenberger

I grew up playing 'Choose Your Own Adventures', as well as their more conceptually challenging cousins the 'Fighting Fantasy' game books. I cheated a whole lot. This is because I was insatiably curious, and wanted to see where every branch of the story would take me. I used the old 'thumb where I was' trick to see just how my character would be killed if I did something stupid like trying to get the skeleton key out of the poison gas-filled room. As I moved on to videogames, specifically the classic Sierra Quest games, the advent of anytime instant saving and loading made this style of play became much easier, and was even celebrated by the designers, who seemed to take a perverse pleasure in devising hundreds of ways of killing off the player. It's only natural, then, that I love Way of the Samurai 2 as much as I do, because it's the logical extension of that type of gaming, refined to perfection.

Perhaps my favorite thing about it is something that Chi neglected to mention in his main review—just how short the game is. Of course, short isn't the most accurate word to use when describing the game, since players can easily pour dozens of hours into it without seeing every ending. It's just that while most big games are generally long, this one is more wide. If one were to avoid the optional jobs that Chi mentions and just follow the game's plot, it's possible to see an ending within an hour after starting the game. This style of play doesn't do much for the player's sword collection, but the multiple playthroughs it encourages allow gamers to really appreciate just how complex and layered the game's storytelling is.

Just like the first game, the titular samurai is thrown into a town full of opposing factions just days away from exploding. The player becomes the catalyst who decides just which faction will come out on top on the last day. Or not, because just like the first game, the player can decide to up and leave town at any time, abandoning their role in events, and leaving the people of the town to their own devices. While this option of just leaving town isn't as attractive as it was the first time around, where limping away from a bad battle was the only way to keep a particularly rare sword, it's still an important feature of the game—giving the player the freedom to end the game on their own terms is a relatively unique concept in gameplay, and it was a pleasure to see it make another appearance here.

What's truly fascinating is that the game itself makes no moral judgements about the player's actions—the characters within the game do. If I extorted money from a merchant the other merchants would ban me from their stores, cutting me off from the healing supplies that make the game much easier to play. Killing a few too many Yakuza drives the rest to attack me in broad daylight in the middle of the street. It's left completely up to the player to decide what the limits of their character's morality are. The best example of this idea is that the game doesn't classify any of its dozen or so endings as 'good' or 'bad'. As the credits roll, players are awarded the ending they deserve depending on the choices they made during the game. How they feel about that ending is left entirely up to them.

Way of the Samurai 1&2 were both at the very top of the action/RPG genre. The follow-up, Samurai Western took one of the greatest concepts in history, Samurai vs. Gunslingers, and wasted it on a near-unplayable trainwreck. I can only hope that when Spike releases Way of the Samurai for the PS3, that they recognize just how right they got it the first two times around, and produce a third installment that does the series proud.

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