Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword was a game I discovered on the eShop a couple of months back, and seeing the trailer for the game, it looked like a fantastic concept. A game inspired by Japanese legends in terms of story and design, a great battle system where evasive dodging and quick strikes are preferred over just a frontal assault, and an epic journey to rescue a goddess from captivity, Sakura Samurai looked to be another eShop classic, similar to my beloved Mighty Switch Force. When I finally got my teeth sunk in the game, I found it to be entertaining during intense moments and was content with its environments and overall aesthetics, but I was just generally underwhelmed by what Sakura Samurai had to offer.
Sakura Samurai starts off with a well-presented prologue. Back in the days of feudal Japan, there was a god who lives in the mountains, and his daughter was Princess Cherry Blossom, a beloved guardian of the land. One day, an unknown evil kidnapped her, and her lack of influence put the land in disorder, causing people to forget about her, save for one vigilant Kappa, who waits for a pure-hearted samurai to arrive and save the Princess. When you arrive, your sword is enhanced with sakura essence in order to rescue the Princess and the kappa declares you the Sakura Samurai, sending you off on your quest.
It’s a basic story of a hero rescuing a princess, but it’s one that has a great presentation. The art style is cartoony and whimsical, creating an extremely vibrant land to traverse through along with well-designed characters to interact with. It is reminiscent of Okami with its overall aesthetic design, which is definitely refreshing.
While the aesthetics are great, the graphics themselves are not. I am aware that this is a downloadable title from the Nintendo eShop, but it looks like the graphics were rushed, as a few characters and many of the backgrounds have low-resolution textures, making them somewhat blurry. This is especially noticeable in the towns. On a final note, you’ll see similar environments in the regular stages since they reuse the few maps they made for fighting outside the boss dungeon, so be prepared for some familiar sights.
The music itself definitely sets the mood that you’re in Japan. It’s not particularly memorable in my opinion, and is essentially ambient, but it doesn’t break immersion and it does the job. Sound effects and voices definitely play a bigger role and it ties into the gameplay.
The combat is about reading your opponent’s movements, evading their attack at the last second and then striking when they’re open. When you evade properly, you earn precision points that you can sell for gold as well as build your sword meter. The more points you collect without getting hit or having your attack blocked, the more money you make, and when your sword meter is full, you can use a special attack that hits all enemies on screen for massive damage. Once you master reading the enemies’ tells, and go up against a larger group, that’s when the game gets really fun. There are regular swordsmen, spearmen, archers, ninjas, and samurai all out to get you, each with their own attack movements to read off of. As you advance on, you find more powerful versions of the same enemies. They do more damage and move faster, which forces you to speed up your reaction timing as well. You can also use items to heal yourself, distract an enemy, attack from a distance, or repair your sword if it gets dull from improperly planned attacks. Finally, when you beat a level for the first time, you get one half of a cherry blossom petal, which is essentially half a heart piece from Legend of Zelda.
While the battles are fun initially, the gameplay does get repetitive, mainly due to an ultimately limited amount of enemies as well as each enemy attacking one at a time. It is fun to defeat large groups of enemies, especially groups with different enemy types in the later levels, but even perfecting your evasion will wear out at some point. Also, you can enable free movement by holding X during battle, which means you can run. However, this means every single enemy will attack you simultaneously with no way to see how they’re attacking you. The combat system was clearly designed for one-on-one fights, which makes free movement entirely pointless.
There are 3 main parts to Sakura Samurai. There is the Map, which let you move between stages in that colorful overworld, the Field/Dungeon in which you fight enemies and advance to the next stage or boss and the Town. In the town, you can repair and upgrade your sword, buy items, go to the inn to heal and save your game, plus play mini-games. The mini-games involve you slicing a set number of fruit, whether perfectly in half or just slicing in general. You win gold if you wagered it or stamps that you can collect. The stamps, while not essential, can earn you extra items and unlock a more powerful special attack.
New towns gives you different mini games that offer more stamps than previous towns, though if you are patient and grind the 1st town’s mini-games, you can unlock the most powerful special attack within an hour of grinding. To highlight how easy it is to easily upgrade your character, I actually found a design flaw that gives you lots of gold. When you die, the kappa appears on a previously cleared level. By replaying that level, defeated enemies drop 5-7 pieces of gold, and there are usually 2 to 5 enemies in a single level at once. There is no penalty for dying either. (No lost items, gold, decreased sword level, or a different ending) Using this method, I got the most powerful special attack, maxed out my inventory, and upgraded my sword in under an hour. Thankfully, you can’t upgrade your sword to the maximum level in the 1st town, but it still made the early game MUCH easier which should have provided a decent challenge.
When you beat one of the bosses, you unlock a challenge mode in which you have to defeat a set number of enemies in a single run. There are 30, 50, and 100-enemy challenges to tackle, and the only benefit is to see how fast you can beat it. There is also the Rock Garden mode where, once per day, you can register the amount of steps you take with your 3DS to revive dead cherry blossom trees in your garden. There also aren’t any apparent benefits other than for its own sake, though it is nice to have an excuse to go walking. After you beat the main game, you unlock Expert Mode, which has you restart the game with no power-ups or inventory. Enemies deal twice the damage, you can’t increase your max health, and items are twice as expensive. Expert mode also has no benefit for playing other than bragging rights. This game might be worth replaying at least once, though when you finally beat it, you’ve seen everything Sakura Samurai has to offer, and for 7 dollars, that’s not a lot of value.
Sakura Samurai is not a bad game. It’ll run you between 2-5 hours if you stick to the main game without trying to upgrade your character, 10 hours if you want to beat the challenges, maximize your character and finish Expert Mode. It has a visual aesthetic that reminds me of Okami and I think that a combat system requiring precision and finesse to attack rather than brute force is definitely engaging. It was what led me to download the title to begin with. However, with the gameplay becoming much easier and repetitious as I played, the appeal quickly wore off. It never got frustrating or annoyingly bad, but it just became boring. For 7 dollars, I expected just a little more content or slightly more varied combat that would’ve made the game a solid buy, especially since it was shorter than I anticipated. If you must get it, I would wait until it either drops down to at least 5 dollars, appears on the Club Nintendo website as a downloadable title, or if the eShop has a sale on their games.