Even with multiple endings, this game doesn't last very long.

User Rating: 6 | Samurai Dou 2: Way of the Samurai 2 PS2
Samurai. The legends of Japan. People who would commit suicide instead of surrendering, if my history book told me the truth.

Way of the Samurai 2 is not about samurai. That may be surprising, but it seems the developers have never seen a history textbook. In this game, you create a character, and you're a bum with a sword in feudal Japan who is starving when a little girl gives him a rice ball to eat, at the start of the game. Guess that makes you a samurai? Anyway, the story is not so great, and given how short the game is you would have thought the developers would have put more work into the story. There are multiple endings, but all but two of the story paths have the same ending. And none of the endings are good.

You can make choices on what to say which sometimes affects the story, and you can do stuff to prolong your story, but mostly it makes no difference. None of the characters are likeable - a dumb girl who the townspeople call 'No-name' (but you can find her real name by teaching her to read and write), a woman who runs some kind of business, a few side characters and Hanzayaman Takamura who is the 'rebel leader' of the town of Amahara.

The gameplay - you walk around town but there's rarely ever anything to do except go in the shops for doing stuff like eating to restore health or drinking alcohol which increases your energy but loses you some health. And you never need the shops because it's too short. You can talk to people, but nothing they say is interesting. If you kill even one person (except thugs), all the shopkeepers kick you out of their shop when they see you. Honestly, what else is there to do in free-roaming except kill a few people? You can visit a dojo where they teach you how to fight, but you learn as much on the fly.

There are different types of swords like 'Ore' and 'Ninja' and the swords break if you use them too much without pausing between attacks. You can collect items like scrolls which power up your swords and food items which restore health. You can roam around, sleep in your house, etc. Just pass the time. There isn't much to do.

The graphics are not very good, and all battles have the same music - which is decent but gets repetitive. The voice acting is poor, but the sound effects are good. There aren't that many options in create-a-character mode, which means whatever you create, you won't like in the least.

Overall, the developers really could have put together a good game here, but they didn't even bother to do a little homework. Even after playing through all the story paths and watching all the endings, I wasn't all that satisfied. Way of the Samurai 2 is historically inaccurate, gameplay-wise and graphically average, and the voice acting will hurt the ears of anyone with functioning aural cavities. It's really disappointing what the developers came up with when they had such a good premise to go on. I wanted to like this game, but it's hard to. Overall, this is not the best samurai-based game.