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An evil warlord comes back to modern times after 400 years of being dead, and starts
wreaking havoc all over the place, requiring you and your band of allies to put things
right through martial force. Yes, it's Sakura Wars: So Long My Love... no, wait. This is
an SNK game. Yes, it's Sengoku, but not Sengoku Basara because there aren't bishounen everywhere.
No, it's... an even older-school side-scrolling brawler than even Burning Fight, featuring
often-jarring transitions between walking the mean streets and being teleported up into
the clouds where evil presumably-undead ninja and samurai and whatnot *** around and it's
all pretty darn creepy. Still, it's a diversion from the mysterious drumcan chicken standard
of the industry, and the supernatural aspect kinda helps explain the legions of carbon-copied
enemies. Plus... you get to be a dog.
Along the course of the game, our hero - either a Ninja or a... um... cowboy, obligatorily
named Dan and Bill respectively - can recruit an armor-clad dog (whose basic attack doesn't
seem to work all that well but whose jumping Mecha Sonic-style attack is ridiculously effective),
a Samurai in full oni getup (who comes equipped with swords, and thus does at least double
damage to pretty much everything), and... another ninja, who's got shuriken up the ***
and can just rain damage upon everyone. And then he goes and backflips around everywhere.
You can switch to these helpers from your basic form whenever the gauge on the top of
the screen tells you you can, but it usually involves taking a free hit due to the latency
involved in, y'know, soul transference. And so it continues, walking to the right because
that's just the direction you go in this genre, and occasionally being summoned to the clouds
for a beating at the hands of this Benkei-looking dude.
Aside from the creepy disembodied head at the beginning and the rather drastic shifts
in tone throughout the course of the game, Sengoku is... well, a very standard side-scrolling
brawler, punctuated by shiny glowing orbs that occasionally bestow power-ups. Yes, when
you've got the spirit world involved like this, you can manifest a sword or, heck, even
two swords simply by collecting the appropriately-colored dot and standing still until they've been
animated into existence. And that's fortunate, because the extra firepower (or in this case,
steelpower) (unless it's a yellow orb, then it becomes fireball power) certainly comes
in handy against bosses and, yes, even rank-and-file enemies who have not only incredible defenses,
but ways to break your every combo. That is, unless you're swinging around the ol' psychically-generated
Hattori Hanzo steel like you're Uma Thurman and the 5,6,7,8's have just stopped playing.
So does Sengoku stack up against Streets of Final Ninja Sunset X-Turtles Vs. Predator?
Not on your life. Can it suck a few quarters out of morbid curiosity, the kind fueled by
a title screen featuring a disembodied head and cackling laughter? Absolutely. But fortunately,
you can find it these days on your home consoles' Virtual Console or on the SNK Arcade Classics
compilation disc, thus eliminating the need to pump in credit after credit until you've
expended the gross national product of Uganda.