The entirety of Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked can be filtered down into one word: weird. From the onset of the game, you’re thrown into a bizarre plotline featuring witches, ninjas, hallucinations, and the occasional snake crawling down your gullet. All in a day’s work for Grasshopper Manufacture and Suda 51.

Killer 7, the development team’s most notable project so far, feels like a preamble to the design of Sidetracked. Given Killer 7’s controversial nature—some people will tell you it’s total crap, yet a few call it utter genius—it was clear Sidetracked would be another “love it or hate it” affair, making the job of a game reviewer that much harder.

On the surface, Sidetracked is a mediocre hack n’ slash. Battlegrounds are usually barren and uninteresting, enemies are repetitive, and the graphics are nothing to write home about. A little digging reveals the true riches of the game, however.

Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked, much like its inspiration, is heavy on style and music. The game’s core mechanic, for example, is based around buying records for the soundtrack. Each contains a canned branching combo to execute, with a guide at the top of the screen. If you’d rather not see the combo branches, which is understandable, a tap of a button replaces it with a graphic of the records. At any time, you can switch between two styles (and records) you start with, giving some variety to the violence.

Sidetracked also provides some interesting mechanics outside of the basic cut and run gameplay. If swords clash within battle, buttons pop up on the screen. Choose the right one and you win the clash, dealing some damage and avoiding some to yourself. After a bit of skillful fighting, characters fully unlock their potential. The branching combo becomes longer and more exotic, allowing for more style and damage to be thrown about. Even more, a lighted segment of the branching combo leads to your character going into hyper mode, which is basically an excuse to go really fast and kill everything…not that I’m complaining.

Somehow, the gameplay gets even weirder when an enemy with a marker over his head appears. Hit him, and you go into a dojo setting to battle. One hit starts the one-sided fight, and it’s a race against time to mash all the buttons as quick as you can to land over a hundred hits on him. Do that, and you’re thrown into an arena where everyone is shown as silhouettes. A hundred enemies later, and you unlock an item in the shop.

Of course, as unorthodox as the gameplay sounds, the style of the game is twice as strange. Most levels are fairly boring, but sometimes you’re thrown into psychedelic pastures with mutton chopped chimps…sometimes, you find yourself in a Mario themed world…and sometimes, just sometimes, you’re staring at the screen wondering why exactly someone thought the game was nearing coherence.

Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked is a hard sell due to it just being so weird. Strange gameplay styles and psychedelia combine to make a game that is at once compelling and borderline offensive in its ways. It’s not for everyone, but giving it a try will most likely having anyone scratching their heads and reaching for the controller.

	Overflowing with style
	Great soundtrack
	Interesting gameplay mechanics
	Shallow gameplay
	Too weird for the mainstream?