Though its formula is creative because its based more around reality, logic is never there to guide your course
Way of the Samurai 3 is set during the Warring States era of Feudal Japan in the late 1500's. Oda Nobunaga, lord of Owari province, is planning an attack on the fictional province Amana ruled by the fictional ruler Fujimori Shuzen, who had overthrown the former ruling clan Sakurai. Because of this, Shuzen heavily levies produce from his peasant class in preparation for a coming battle, but shows no consideration to any of them in the process. This, as well as his unscrupulous usurpation of the Sakurai lord, leads the Umemiya family, a loyal clan of the Sakurai, to join together with bandits and other low lives to form a conjoined clan called the Amana to fight Shuzen.
You play as a wandering samurai who will decide the fate of the Amana, the Fujimori, and the peasant class by making choices for them via arriving at story cutscenes that are separated into one of the eight areas of the game. As you progress in this way you will need to defend yourself. In doing this you have access to katanas that are categorized into a variety of stances that determine your attacks as well as one spear stance. These weapons may be forged with the use of a blacksmith, who can create you weapons as well as strengthen existing ones.
Commands range from light strikes to heavier strikes to grabbing your opponent and kicking them, kicking them normally, strafing their attacks, parrying, and blocking. Your weapons learn a couple new Y moves after so many fights while the remaining Y moves require you to obtain random scrolls in a set configuration.
The game is based around completing multiple playthroughs, all of which being very short ones. Each of them will take you no longer than two to three hours to finish, and there are ~21 endings to arrive at. Depending on your difficulty level and a few other factors you will be awarded a set number of Samurai Points at the end of each playthrough, which translate into a light variety of unlockables. A cause and effect system is the basis for the game.
----- Review:
-------------- Pros:
* Since the story is fictional but still marginally based on a period in Japanese history, Way of the Samurai 3 has a good capacity to draw you in for its familiar setting while not being self-limiting
* Every original character in the game has a unique personality, specific goals to fulfill, and all have relatively equal importance in story development, so interaction with them has balance and meaning
* No matter how many cloned characters you see area to area they each have something different to say, bare their own names, and are always a part of a certain duty or activity, so nothing seems that lifeless when you're conversing
* You may turn on Japanese voice acting, which is a good surge of authenticity
* Battles with enemies is rewarding: if you kill them you will acquire their weapon, and there is a possibility they will also drop pommels, blades, and tsubas, which may be forged into new weapons. This helps keep the game feeling realistic and maintains a reward value for winning fights.
* Battles with enemies is balanced: instead of killing an enemy you may knock them out with the blunt side of your weapon. You won't be rewarded with anything but a skin of the unconscious character once your a while into the game if you do this but you won't sour any relationships at the same time, so it serves as a powerful balancer.
* There are one-hundred and two weapons to find in the game, leaving you to choose between relatively nine or ten weapons per style (each with about one unique Y attack), which is good because it lets the player variate without abandoning his favorite style
* Most of what you do in the game (even things as frivolous as bumping into a certain character x number of times) is kept in record for you to view at any time, so it is easy to track your achievement progress and aim for higher scores in specific gameplay fields
* Every faction in the game has ordinary tasks for you to do to earn yen, but since these are merely optional tasks for the most part, you gain the benefit of getting through the game at a faster rate at the cost of earning less money, giving the player good control of where he wants to take his playtime. This also implies your position as just another samurai without pushing you in a direction you may not want to go in.
* Despite how little room each of three factions take up in the game, you can still grasp what culture they are upholding and when they have dissenting members in their group, allowing the player to relate slightly better with whatever circumstances they become a part of
* Many of the plot lines simply come across as intriguing, making you want to investigate your place in them further
* For every weapon there is a stress meter that will break down that weapon's efficiency if the meter is completely filled, balancing button mashing and aggressive play
* With so many endings to search out, dedicated players won't feel ultimately cheated
-------------- Pros (2):
* No matter who you run into you always have the option to kill that person and take whatever belongings of theirs that might pop up, so the player has stylish ways to cut corners such as killing a merchant they bought from to be refunded with all the money they had given him
* Every action (aside from blunt attack KOs) has some kind of consequence, and even when a faction demands recompense for a bad act you committed to a member of theirs, the game pits you in a challenge where you need to defeat one-hundred of their enemies in an arena. This is good because you can derive a lot of skill points, items, fun, and challenge from punishment rather than netting a loss while still feeling the weight of consequence.
* Earning basic unlockables such as appearance quirks, additional skins, and new difficulty levels as you play through the game maintains a fair amount of flow after playthroughs and lets the player know his options are open to increase
* There are multiple women scattered about the game that you can make your temporary partner to carry weapons for you, fight with you, or to simply talk to. This is a good feature because they each tell you their own mini-stories and it allows the game to come across to the player as more presentable and as a sandbox full of small, personal choices.
* Being able to teleport to any of the eight locations in the game via the map menu screen at the expense of in-game time is great for saving yourself playtime and achieving new records
* The item interface is great: just assign them to the directional buttons of your d-pad and they can be accessed immediately. This means less menu searching and more real-time action.
* There are a large variety of items to purchase from merchants or find in the game such as dolls that restore your life after you die, attack and defense boosters, or simply healers, which makes it feel like a genuine role playing game despite how short your role is in the game
* There are over forty titles (ex: Vegetarian, Faithful Samurai) that you may receive at the end of your playthroughs depending on specific actions you took, which adds, to a degree, bragging rights and objective play
* You can have a hand in multiple mini-games such as radish chopping, tuna cutting, or rice ball meshing with a partner, which adds a layer of culture and differentiation to every playthrough
* There are many dlc accessories such as gold afros, angel wings, Star Wars-esque armor, and new weapons, which allow a little more room for variety and tell you that the developers have the marketplace on their mind
* The soundtrack has its good moments, such as delivering you a tranquil song at the title screen, and a few of the environments have ambient sounds that add some realism to your adventure
----------- Cons:
* The graphics are original Xbox quality and the textures look worse when it is nighttime
* The controls/commands are unintuitive and difficult to get back into because most of them require the use of RB and LB + X, Y, A, and B, or an instant kill mechanic that has QTEs that are near-impossible to input in time
* Since each of the commands are finicky to begin with and you are punished by your enemies when you make even the slightest error, which therein leads you to prioritize certain weapon styles, you will be pressing the X and Y buttons the most and will have reason to search out the weapon in that style with the cheapest Y attack, adding repetition and bad incentives to the battle system
* The spear stance is the best stance in the game because it has the longest reach, so you can simply run away from your opponent temporarily and then slash back at him with your spear as he runs at you unguarded until he's defeated. This is bad because you lose your reason to variate in weapon styles and the game tends to force you to be cheap in order to get where you need to go.
* The AI is poor: characters can be stuck behind objects such as a railway to a set of stairs and will let you wail on them until they die; they will try to jump up from the same spot in a trench only to be slapped back down by your attacks; NPCs will attack you for simply seeing you with a drawn sword
* The physics are poor: jumping onto different levels of ground results in inaccuracies; your feet will be caught up on a set of planks six inches or less from the ground; characters will occasionally climb up still objects if they are thrown at them
* Though the eight environments in the game keep the game condensed and concentrated, they are very small in span, have average architecture, etc., and ultimately barely have a purpose outside of story cutscenes being organized into them.
------------ Cons (2):
* For each playthrough you must view twelve cutscenes before your ending is determined. This wouldn't sound so bad if you began the game knowing what's happening. Instead, you enter the game completely ignorant of the world you're in despite being a samurai who just survived a major battle, and the only way for you to learn is to complete the game multiple times. This sets an ugly learning curve to a game that's meant to be based on decision making.
* In any story cutscene you can only guess what kind of effect you will make by being in it. These cutscenes are so exacting that you might get a completely different ending by, for example, watching a main character pray in front of a grave or mentioning the word 'sakura' to him as he stands in front of it later. And since you can't choose to communicate to those characters outside of a small dialogue window to possibly alter the story, and the dialogue that you may choose can only imply an effect, you have very limited control and awareness of your story development, which is a major flaw.
* The game has no natural ending, and it makes no sense how you, a person who can barely communicate and isn't known by anybody, could influence it to the point that you do
* There are only about twelve quests total, each of them are dull, and none are added after playthroughs
* Since there is only one song per environment, you have little to do per environment, and the story doesn't change in any way playthrough to playthrough, there is nothing stopping you from feeling ever-increasing boredom towards the game
* The weapon system is poor: you don't learn skills, your weapon does. This means that no matter how many skills you acquired for one weapon in a style, you need to re-learn those skills for every other weapon in that style.
* Earning skills is very convoluted: at a random juncture one weapon of yours will stop learning skills (or maybe never begin learning skills) and you will need to select from a Basic scroll, an Advanced scroll, a Ninja Scroll, etc. to satisfy the conditions for the remaining skill or two. It's simply confusing, irritable, and isn't even remotely realistic.
* If you were to kill too many characters in the game, or simply upset a remaining one or two cutscenes by killing the host of those cutscenes, you will be left with a blank slate and will have to start over your game
---------- Conclusion:
Way of the Samurai 3 has many, many good ideas, and without a doubt its cause-and-effect system and its 'replay for the conclusion you must get for the sake of others' element its based around has great potential and gives the game its life. But unfortunately you never feel like you are some type of hero constantly returning to the spotlight to solve a complex problem for others because of what little there is to do in the game and its severe lack of logic to bind together the narrative that's there. Hopefully the next Way of the Samurai changes this and shines as brightly as this release should have. My suggestion: rent.