Way of the Samurai 4 Impressions - Preview
by Karl Koebke , posted on 11 June 2012 / 3,646 Views
When I think about it a bit there seem to be two clear types of open world games. The serious open worlds where you have freedom but only within what's reasonable for your character, like Grand Theft Auto, and games that eschew that standard and go for the ridiculous. Way of the Samurai 4 is quite clearly in the second category.
The storyline takes place in Japan right after the borders were opened and internationalization began. Three factions are now in constant turmoil: the British, who are trying to establish a presence for trading; the anti-foreigner activists, who want things to go back to the way they once were; and the Shogunate who are trying to keep the peace by whatever means necessary. A lone samurai walks into town and immediately gets caught in between all of these warring factions.
The gameplay is a lot like that found in the Yakuza titles; you roam the city completing story quests if you like, but you can also just play around to your heart's content. Unlike Yakuza, though, you have more freedom in how you interact with people, in that you can randomly slice up any NPCs you come across. Of course, this will affect how people react to you, and will even have repurcussions in later playthroughs. You see, Way of the Samurai 4 is actually only 1-10 hours long (depending on the ending you go for), but in order to really see everything the game has to offer you're going to have to play through numerous times.
One nice addition to this type of gameplay is a flowchart that shows you which scenes you've already watched in previous playthroughs and which you have yet to see, which should make life easier for the completionists out there. Some things carry over between playthroughs too. For example, in Little England you can't talk to most of the residents since you speak Japanese and they only speak English, and what few residents you can talk to speak extremely broken English/Japanese. But if you can successfully establish a Language School in a playthrough - and protect it - you can learn English and this will allow you to talk to everyone in Little England in all later playthroughs.
Seeing as it's a Samura game, it's not surprising that there are lots of weapons available. The demoer told me that there were 100s of swords. These weapons have durability and degradation. When a weapon goes down to zero durability and breaks you can fix it but it'll cost you some degradation to the sword. Too much degradation and you'll have a much more difficult time fixing the weapon.
If you get bored with sword fighting you can always go out night crawling and attempt to hook up with some women. Get lucky and you'll enter a pillow fight combat where everyone's a winner. If you can decrease her endurance enough then it's time for sexy time (all just inferred, though; this isn't that kind of game). Even if you get arrested it isn't going to go how you'd expect. Back in those days they were more into torture than jail time and if you can survive the torture minigame for a minute or so then you can leave. I honestly might take that option myself over years in prison.
Way of the Samurai 4 will be releasing this Summer on PSN. Fans of strange open world games should definitely keep an eye out.
