Disappointing game. Great anime, but didn't translate well into a game, even when headed by a visionary like Suda 51.

User Rating: 4 | Samurai Champloo PS2
This game isn't worth the money, I'm afraid to say. The music isn't bad at all, in fact that's one of the better things in the game, but the rest of the game is shoddy. Most gameplay revolves around repeatedly performing several different attacks in various combinations, which look cool at first, but don't grant much substance. In between fighting, you can buy items in a town, which doesn't offer much and makes the game feel even more empty. It seems that this game was pressured to be released before it was really developed into something solid.

The anime was good, even though it wasn't nearly as good in my opinion as Cowboy Bebop, Shinichiro Watanabe's previous opus. It's interesting to note that the Cowboy Bebop video game was cancelled, perhaps due to the poor showing from this game. And when you have a visionary developer like Suda 51 making the game, and coming out with this poor showing, it certainly would spook me as an investor in any subsequent anime based projects the company has going.

I wrote this review not to bash this game, but to attempt to dissuade those on the fence about this game from burning their money like I did. For the same price, you can pick up a better game by Suda 51 like Killer7, or a better anime adaptation game such as Ghost in the Shell by Bandai, an underrated game in my opinion.