Afro Samurai

Its truly refreshing to come across a game OST that's worth listening to, much less worth listening to outside the game. Unfortunately, Afro Samurai has one such OST. If you're into beats and hip hop that is. Afro Samurai actually makes a big deal of point out The RZA was involved with the soundtracks conception, but its clear no one was consulted for anything else.

As a result, everything else in the game from story to the gameplay is a mess. Oh sure, the graphics are delightfully cel-shaded, but the characters all betray their beautiful textures with sticky jerky animations. This may be somewhat intentional with the gameplay's focus on preemptive Matrix dodges, parries, and bullet slicing but all the stylish cuts and screen edits in the world don't take away from the fact that you very rarely have any idea if an enemy is attacking, dodging, taunting or recoiling. Not until they fall to pieces and fountain with blood anyway.

And in that regard the game proves itself fairly functional, slicing enemies to pieces is both easy and enjoyable. But Afro's combat options are unlocked almost randomly, and when you get them they're still sticky to execute with collision weirdness all over the place. He's got a ton of moves with posing and bloodletting and style and grace galore, but they all require between four and nine uninterrupted slashes to execute, a feat rarely allowed by enemies and their assortment of dirty ai tricks. Loaded with old school tactics like striking from camera blind spots, hiding beyond movement barriers, recovering spontaneously from stun, and ignoring the invincible properties of your defense altogether, group battles call upon every bad beat'em up memory I have. This isn't so bad most of the time since life is over abundant and easily recovered, but sooner or later you will be killed by the last enemy in a massive checkpointless melee because he ignored your ordinarily safe basic slash animations.

Now just in case you're saying; "All licensed games play like crap, I'm just here for the story" I assure you they've made steps to louse that up pretty good too. Using flowery nonsensical and totally unskippable dialogues between lifeless stationary characters the game poorly illustrates this tale of violence and revenge. When all is said and done you can comfortably say "Afro killed everybody" but the character relationships, even WHY most of them got dead are lost in a sea of flash backs and dream sequences and Ninja Ninja profanity. Oh sure, hearing Samuel Jackson curse at me can be entertaining, but it doesn't make the how and why any easier to follow. To make matters worse, I have since discovered (in desperately trying to reconcile the gaps in my understanding) that most of my confusion resulted from the games plot being outright changed from the canon.

Now I don't think a bunch of suits threw money at game-izing the Afro Samurai property because they thought its story needed work. I don't care what "approvals" were gotten, it takes serious stones to totally 180 key elements of somebody else's work. Granted, some of it makes sense to insert a level here or a boss fight there, but to fundamentally change the ending? There's actually a fairly amusing point in the game where right before something important doesn't happen Ninja Ninja remarks "I know you seen how this is in the TV Show, but this ain't no TV Show" but since at the time I hadn't seen the TV Show, so the significance was totally wasted on me. In fact, it seems as if the entire closing chapter of the story was changed for absolutely no reason.

So, the bottom line is. Afro Samurai is a pretty crappy game with great music. And I'm gonna have to watch the darned series anyway because the good people at Surge couldn't even be bothered to leave the story intact. Hours invested, with all the abilities unlocked and a full understanding of all the combats glitches, you can have a lot of fun precision slicing people to hip hop beats, but that feels more like an apologist attitude than an optimists. At the very least, its a (fairly) easy 1k addition to my gamerscore, but that still wouldn't comfort me 10 hours of my life later if I'd spent a single red cent on the game. It didn't make me physically ill to play like say, Mirror's Edge, but a number of times I did catch myself saying "Why am I still playing this?" So, I'm sorry Samuel Jackson, big thumbs down.