Add this game to the deluge of me-too rip offs being released these days on the PlayStation. To be honest, I had never even heard of the game until I received it for review. It doesn’t appear that Konami is hyping the game too much, and for good reason. The best way to describe this game is Resident Evil with swords. Don’t get me wrong, this game doesn’t have any of the fun stuff that Resident Evil has, instead it merely resembles it to a degree. All of the areas of the game have fixed camera angles while the main characters and enemies are polygonal. At the beginning of the game you are allowed to pick your character. You can choose either Hiba Kotaro (the guy) or Lin of Sekirei (the girl). Each character has special abilities that can be learned via experience points that are earned by defeating enemies. In this respect the game manages to throw a few role-playing game elements in to liven things up, but unfortunately it’s not enough to leverage the game up to playable standards.

The play control in Soul of the Samurai is unforgivable. One button draws your sword, one button swings the sword, one button jumps, one button blocks, and one button allows you to use an auxiliary weapon or item. With the weapon drawn your character moves excruciating slow, so it’s difficult to avoid enemy attacks. Most of the time there will be two enemies attacking you simultaneously. This generally wouldn’t be a problem, but you usually have to get close enough to strike them with your sword. As you are swinging your weapon at one enemy, the other usually gets a few swings in on you. There’s practically no way to avoid being hit, which becomes exceedingly frustrating when fighting boss characters. Since the camera angle is not dynamic, it becomes very challenging to determine exactly how close you are standing to the enemy characters. Many times I’d take a swipe with my sword thinking I’d hit the enemy, only to miss and then they’d inch closer and take a stab at me. Simply pressing the attack button will yield several sword swipes and usually a special move at the end, such as an uppercut. Other button combinations can yield special moves, but for the most part this game is just a button masher with no coordination needed. The moves are very limited and even though new techniques will be learned, they aren’t too spectacular to utilize.

The game propels itself through a boring story. I never did come to care for the characters in the least and the writing is just terrible. You start the game in a village square where you’ll have to talk to some of the townspeople to find out what’s happening. The dialog is so bad it’s actually humorous. Once you obtain the clue needed you’ll be allowed to exit the village. The game is fairly linear, much more so than the Resident Evil games. I never felt any sense of exploration, only the boredom of going from one screen to the next mashing the attack button. Let’s just say there’s not much innovation or freedom given to the player.

Soul of the Samurai is a perfect example of not being able to judge a game based on its opening cinema. The FMV CG cinema at the beginning of the game is above average and had me hoping this game might actually be something special. The in-game graphics are extremely static with no interaction with backgrounds whatsoever. The animation when the characters run is so choppy that it looks simply ridiculous. The polygonal characters are fairly small on the screen most of the time and they don’t look very detailed. I really didn’t see any graphical effects in the game that would set it apart from first generation software.

The music is probably the best aspect of the game. There are some decent tracks that range all the way from a Japanese flair to a techno beat when the fighting really starts kicking in. Beyond the music, the game has average sound effects with nothing spectacular helping the game out.