Here we have Samurai Showdown Anthology for the Playstation 2 system, a system that has been around for about 9 years compared to Samurai Showdown's 15th year run which I can honestly say that none of the 6 games have aged well all that (specially Samurai Showdown 6 being the newest). Right off the bat you will notice that the controls are somewhat difficult to understand considering Samurai Showdown was originally a NeoGeo arcade game which was based on a joystick with 4 colored buttons going from A to D but on the manual and the on-game help none of the buttons are mentioned as the game shows making it difficult to execute a special move or even figure out what button therefore getting easily confused with the buttons that need to be pushed apart from the ridiculous directional combinations. Now as far as the graphics go, as I mentioned earlier you are looking at 15+ years old pixelated graphics on some of the games while Samurai Showdown 6 looks the worst while it's supposed to be the newest. Another thing that I dont know wether to bring up or not is the fatality issues in the game, basically in the original 2 games your character was able to cut his opponent in half when winning or getting cut in half when losing but I did not see that happen in the first 2 games therefore apart form the bad graphics, bad control scheme and bad translation ... I can honestly say this is a far from perfect arcade translation. The only good thing apart from the price ($15-$20) of the game would have to be the option to change the music type from the Original Arcade version to the Arranged (remade). Other than that, I cant truly recommend this game at all, unless you hate your Playstation 2 or Playstation 3 (in my case) so much your willing to break it from getting frustrated with this godawful game.
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