seven samurai 20xx is the kind of game that really only could have happened on the ps2; a dystopic scifi remake of a 1950s samurai movie in the style of a DMC game, with some cool rpg towns and a dub featuring a who's-who of the era's most recognisable dub actors and with big names outside attached to it too like mobius and Ryuichi Sakamoto, a big budget game that's about as niche as they come, and god am I part of that niche, this is one of the best games I've ever played and a real frontrunner (alongside bujingai and sympathy kiss) for my game of the year. it's such a sincere game and it commits itself to what it is so wholley that you can't help but love it, though i will admit i haven't seen the movie, i might, one day, i'm not really a movie person and this does seem good but i want to come at the game with a fresh set of eyes so i decided not to watch the movie first, i liked having this as my first real experience with the movie and it hit me hard, harder i think than if i watched the movie first so i'd say do that if you can.

okay so combat first since its one of the games coolest points. it's the big focus of the gameplay here outside of the towns and it's really fun, it's simple with just one real attack button and two weapon styles, one handed and duel wield, you attack normally with your first sword which I think does a little more damage but is slow and has less moves but you have a meter that refils super quickly (faster with just attacks which are when you attack an enemy when aiming at them directly with the analogue stick or instantly with a just guard which is a perfectly timed guard) and this lets you go into that duel sword mode and really wreak havoc, this meter is the main crux of the gameplay and while it might seem weird to put the whole combat system behind a meter, it works, it goes up super fast and you can still very much defend yourself with the one sword, but where it shines is in trying to maximise that meter gain with the guards and the just attacks because when you get good with those you will practically never be without meter and you can even keep it infinitely going once you go into that mode if you really get good with the guards. the guarding system is a little weird, it almost feels more like something out of an RPG than an action game and I think it might be my favourite part of the game, just because it actually made guarding fun for me, a first honestly. the way it works is by having it not really be an active or timed thing, the block is a passive meter that when you hit triangle will run down for a second or two and if the enemy attacks during this time, which runs down even while you attack so your blocking won't interrupt your attack unless an attack is blocked, and either the meter runs down or you block and It starts going back up, this makes blocking so much easier and it interrupts the flow of the fights so much less, I love it, there is still skill involved too like how hitting triangle at the right time will do that just guard and fill your double swords or how you can run out of guard meter very easy if you just spam it, it's so fun and cool and I wish more games were like this. that's the gist of the combat system, you can spawn health items by defeating enemies and you have a dodge that's super useful when you run out of guard, it's a simple system but there's enough depth to it to make it really fun, especially in the boss fights.

the boss fights are one of the best parts about the game, they're all unique and varied, I love the optional bosses like the guitar guy with the afro and the samurai girl, the rapping twins are iconic and there's so many of them that it becomes hard to name them all, but none of them were ever annoying and its always fun to see what the game comes up with, like randomly being attacked by rappers or a hockey player whos on fire or one boss who looks right out of dirge of Cerberus and the gameplay shines here. boss fights really showcase the strengths of the system, where your guarding is at its best and it really challenges you to try and maximise the sword gage, I spent a lot of these boss fights in constant duel mode because I learned their tells early on and it was so much fun seeing those just guards and being able to wail on them and it's probably the games best part, probably, the towns here are equally as cool as the people you fight in them. when you aren't fighting you're usually either in a linier level, which are cool in their own right and super varied with tons of cool one off locations like the ruins and the junk town outskirts and the opening dungeon which is on fire, but its the towns full of NPC's that stand out to me the most. you'll see a junk town, a huge cyberpunk city with different floors and districts and tons to explore, it's even split into distinct areas with Japanese or Chinese theming and has cool landmarks like a Sakura tree made of light or a rooftop area covered in neon signs, there's the villiage you need to defend which has enterable houses and a cool forest on the outskirts and there's even a cool desert town with a bazaar and a colosseum (that you can unlock as a postgame mode), they're all fully explorable and have NPCs to talk to and even bosses to find, the big down has a whole gauntlet of bosses to find and fight and they're all a lot of fun and add to the world hugely, these are some of the coolest towns in any game and the fact they're just nestled in an otherwise linier ps2 action game is really cool, they're worth playing the game for alone.

the story is really good! good enough to have me crying at a few points. the cast of samurai are all super charming, and while not all of them are equally developed (eight, totsuma and que are much more interesting than the other samurai), they're all likable and they get some time to shine each, though the game does play favourites with a few like eight and totsuma, some like Jodie or rojie really don't get much time to shine. it's still a great time though, it has hours of really good cutscenes and even the side cast are fun to be around, with one of the best runs of bosses in the medium and its all wrapped up super nicely, i can't tell you weather its a good adaptation though, never seen the movie and given its 3 hour length i have no plans to anytime soon, but i really enjoyed it anyway, it takes you to such cool locales and the world is nice to explore and when SPOILERS many of the samurai die it did get me emotional and i did cry, eight and totsuma's deaths broke me and i had to pause the game to process it both times, which should really speak to just how good the story is here, it might be one of my favourites on the system, though i do think some parts like the girl you need to protect and the big sand colosseum city are a little underdeveloped.

it's a beautiful game, with amazing character designs and some amazing environments, i already talked about how cool the towns are but the character designs too are really great, they're done mostly by mobius, a French artist famous for a bunch of things i know nothing about, but he also did jodoroskis dune which i walked a documentary on once so i know a little bit about his work from that, they all look super cool and the bosses especially are all amazing, like the dirge of Cerberus looking rival humanoid, the cool samurai woman in the city or the guitar boss and the final one looks especially amazing, very sepheroth and even rando NPC's all have super distinctive and cool designs, the samurai too look really cool, totsuma and que especially, and natto has some amazing animations for his sword swinging that remind me of how fluid the fighting animations were in bujingai, its almost wuxia with how stylish the flurry's of duel sword strikes are, and the ui oh god the UI like look at that, the cool numbers and the combo counter with all the cool things it can say and the COLOURS like wow, this game might be one of the best looking games on the system, maybe even one of the coolest looking games ever made

the music is interesting, the games opening and ending themes are made by Ryuichi Sakamoto, the dreamcast intro guy who also did some other stuff, too important for me to do him justice, but the rest of the music was done by someone, I don't really know who, there's a few people listed for sound but none are listed as the composer, there's Masayuki Maruyama, who worked on games like street golfer, aquapazza, ghost squad, ninja gaiden, galerians ash and outrun 2SP, a killer lineup of games like wow, there was Masahiko Hagio who worked on one of the best sounding games ever made, no more heroes 2 as well as games like tales of the tempest, rumble fish, DOA3, galerians ash and the original galerians. Aiko Yamamoto who worked on street golfer, adventure of Tokyo sea Disney and wizards harmony 2. any one of these three could have done the rest of the soundtrack, but i'm willing to bet it was a collaborative effort and it is a really solid soundtrack, some great battle themes and ambient music here both. the voice cast also is amazing, it's got a ton of the most recognisable dub actors of the time, liam obrian as natoe the MC (i kept thinking he was called natto, natto is cool) , michelle ruff as Jodie, Michael McConnohie as kambei. Doug Erholtz as tatsuma, Gwendoline Yeo as que (might recognise her from FF 10-2 as paine), you got crispin freeman, mary elizabeth mcglynn, dave whittenburg, its a stacked cast for anyone that likes older dubs, for a lot of people they'll kind of gloss over this since i can't imagine there's a ton of dub fans out there but for someone like me it was really cool to see just how many voices i recognised, i prefer dubs, especially older ones like this.

it's a nice length too, about 6 hours a good chunk of which are the cutscenes and thats with finding all the side bosses which could add an extra hour and a half to the runtime and its easy to boot which is a really nice bonus, you also have the side modes once you beat the game like the collosseum and the survival mode so the game gives you enough to do if you really want to. the game is pretty cheap to buy these days, about £10 in pal regions and i can't imagine its too expensive elsewhere, it's never been ported though and is highly unlikely to ever get ported since the publisher sammy is long since gone, being absorbed by sega and letting its subsidiaries go, they published tons of the most ps2 ps2 games, like spy fiction, this and like every guilty gear game, their other subsidary high noon would be involved with galerians ash, darkwatch and WET before being aquired by activision and put to work on the COD machine, so this games odds of ever coming back are zero, sadly, but at least its very easily accessable, a rarity for games like this sometimes. the rest of the dev teams attached are just as cool, with two of my personal favourites thrown in there to work on it, dimps and polygon magic. dimps you might know for making freedom wars, one of my favourite games, but also games like SAO fatal bullet, many a dragonball, like evolution psp and breakers, and sonic game ,like sonic lost world, advanced, unleashed and generations, SFXT and USF4, two of my favourite street fighters, spikeout battle street and they most recently did SAO fractured daydream. there was also polygon magic of enchanted arms, rumble roses, el shaddai, quantum theory, silent hill the arcade, bomberman act zero, bleach shattered blade, fighting for one piece, ghost squad, ninja gaiden, maken shao, grandia 2 and countdown vampires you get the idea right, amazing team of people. the game is a real GOTY contender, up there with stuff like bujingai, secret little haven, sympathy kiss and granblue relink, it might even be tied with bujingai, though right now i'm not sure which i would say i like more, i beg you to try it either way, it's the kind of game that just doesn't come along too often and its just so unrelentingly cool throughout, this is one of the best games i think I've ever played.