Broken Code
Afro Samurai is the very definition of style over substance, and it dishonors the awesomeness of its source material.
Published: February 2, 2009
Oh, Afro Samurai, you looked so damn good every time I saw you. Even the opening to the game is so dripping with style and channels the look and feel of the anime that I thought for sure Namco Bandai was bucking the usual trend of licensed games being crap. In fact, Namdai (Bamco? NamBan?) has already demonstrated with the Naruto games that they can take animation and turn it into a fantastic game with their in-house development teams, but for whatever reason, this is most definitely not one of those games. It's a sloppy, frustrating wreck of a game with such a terribly flawed foundation that I have to wonder if they even let the general public touch the game before releasing it.
Oh, and it lacks Trophies. Really? In 2009? For a full retail release? C'mon, guys, that's just adding insult to injury.
I should probably just get the visuals out of the way right now. They're awesome. The look of the game is dead-on, bringing the 2D cel animation of the flick into the third dimension without losing any of the anime's slick line work, attention to detail and character designs. In fact, the game looks so good that for a time I was able to overlook the fact that it played like crap. Unfortuantely, all the slick hand-drawn sketch effects couldn't sway my normal graphic whore tendencies once I started getting into the game's boss fights. It's a crying shame, too, because all that style -- the screen going black and white when Afro focuses his attack to slice an enemy in half at the exact point of impact (read: it's not a pre-selected bit of dismemberment; you can give someone a very close haircut, revealing their grey matter underneat or slice someone clean down the middle), the animation of all the characters, the cutscenes that have people jumping and flipping and spinning into frame -- not to mention the comic (or should that be manga?)-style approach to presenting multiple camera angles is all incredibly slick.
The voice acting, pulled off with the majority of the voice talent from the show, including the all-important pipes of Samuel L. Jackson pulling double-duty as Afro and Ninja Ninja, drops F-bombs throughout the game as only he can. Seriously, the voice acting is fantastic. So are all the sound effects, with clanking steel and clomping footfalls and swooping jumps and whooshing flips. And then there's the music, which culls The RZA's absolutely phenomenal layering of traditional Japanese flutes, koto and almost tribal percussion with some of the sickest beats video games have ever had the pleasure of hosting. It's all great -- head-bobblingly great -- and this is coming from someone who can't seem to find two hip-hop/rap songs in a row that don't make him want to tear his ears off from the sheer inanity these days. The game's presentation isn't the issue.
No, the issue here is how the game plays, which is to say it almost doesn't. The combination of a weird sort of clunkiness to the controls (which force you to use nigh-broken mechanics like wall-running and terrible platforming that can actually checkpoint you behind where you just were), a camera that's almost never in the right place when you need it, and is reversed in how it spins without giving you the option to flip it back to how 90% of games do it in the first place makes even the most routine fights a minor annoyance and boss fights an absolute hair-pulling exercise. If I wasn't reviewing the game I would have never seen how cool the final boss fight looked -- but I also would have saved a major hike in my blood pressure since I had to actually play through the damned thing.
I would love to spent another thousand words bitching about this game, but like the game itself, it would just be a waste of time. Don't rent this, for the love of all that's good and holy don't actually buy the damn thing and if you overhear someone talking about doing either, smack 'em upside the head with a DVD of the animated flick and leave it at that. This is a terrible game, and nobody deserves to suffer through it in the hopes that the few moments of enjoyment might somehow offset the rage-inducing boss fights, piss-poor platforming and overly-repetitive, painfully drawn-out normal combat. Stay far, far away.
Oh, and it lacks Trophies. Really? In 2009? For a full retail release? C'mon, guys, that's just adding insult to injury.
I should probably just get the visuals out of the way right now. They're awesome. The look of the game is dead-on, bringing the 2D cel animation of the flick into the third dimension without losing any of the anime's slick line work, attention to detail and character designs. In fact, the game looks so good that for a time I was able to overlook the fact that it played like crap. Unfortuantely, all the slick hand-drawn sketch effects couldn't sway my normal graphic whore tendencies once I started getting into the game's boss fights. It's a crying shame, too, because all that style -- the screen going black and white when Afro focuses his attack to slice an enemy in half at the exact point of impact (read: it's not a pre-selected bit of dismemberment; you can give someone a very close haircut, revealing their grey matter underneat or slice someone clean down the middle), the animation of all the characters, the cutscenes that have people jumping and flipping and spinning into frame -- not to mention the comic (or should that be manga?)-style approach to presenting multiple camera angles is all incredibly slick.
The voice acting, pulled off with the majority of the voice talent from the show, including the all-important pipes of Samuel L. Jackson pulling double-duty as Afro and Ninja Ninja, drops F-bombs throughout the game as only he can. Seriously, the voice acting is fantastic. So are all the sound effects, with clanking steel and clomping footfalls and swooping jumps and whooshing flips. And then there's the music, which culls The RZA's absolutely phenomenal layering of traditional Japanese flutes, koto and almost tribal percussion with some of the sickest beats video games have ever had the pleasure of hosting. It's all great -- head-bobblingly great -- and this is coming from someone who can't seem to find two hip-hop/rap songs in a row that don't make him want to tear his ears off from the sheer inanity these days. The game's presentation isn't the issue.
No, the issue here is how the game plays, which is to say it almost doesn't. The combination of a weird sort of clunkiness to the controls (which force you to use nigh-broken mechanics like wall-running and terrible platforming that can actually checkpoint you behind where you just were), a camera that's almost never in the right place when you need it, and is reversed in how it spins without giving you the option to flip it back to how 90% of games do it in the first place makes even the most routine fights a minor annoyance and boss fights an absolute hair-pulling exercise. If I wasn't reviewing the game I would have never seen how cool the final boss fight looked -- but I also would have saved a major hike in my blood pressure since I had to actually play through the damned thing.
I would love to spent another thousand words bitching about this game, but like the game itself, it would just be a waste of time. Don't rent this, for the love of all that's good and holy don't actually buy the damn thing and if you overhear someone talking about doing either, smack 'em upside the head with a DVD of the animated flick and leave it at that. This is a terrible game, and nobody deserves to suffer through it in the hopes that the few moments of enjoyment might somehow offset the rage-inducing boss fights, piss-poor platforming and overly-repetitive, painfully drawn-out normal combat. Stay far, far away.
