Skulls of the Shogun: Bone-A-Fide Edition

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local / Online)

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Review:

Note: This game is included in Galak-Z: The Void and Skulls of the Shogun: Bone-A-Fide Edition Platinum Pack, along with Galak-Z: The Void: Deluxe Edition

Skulls of the Shogun is a Turn-Based Strategy game originally released in 2013, with the Nintendo Switch getting a release in 2019 with all of the game’s DLC included in the package. The game follows the warlord Akamoto, killed on the cusp of becoming shogun and ruler of Japan, now gathering forces in the afterlife to take over there.

Skulls of the Shogun uses whimsical, hand-drawn 2D graphics to represent its skeleton characters, with the scenery depicted in a simple, hand-painted style. This is accompanied by a soundtrack designed to imitate traditional Japanese music, with nonsense-speak accompanying the characters’ words as they talk. This is decent enough on the surface, but the areas themselves can look a bit samey, as can the units – the latter of which can be a huge issue when it comes to the gameplay.

Unlike many Turn-Based Strategy games, Skulls of the Shogun doesn’t use any kind of grid or consistent spacing for its characters, which is arguably liberating, but it leads to multiple problems. It’s not always easy to gauge where your characters will come into attacking range of enemies, not easy to gauge where your characters will be at risk of being in the enemy’s attacking range, and it often feels like getting placement right is a process of trial and error.

This is exacerbated by the fact that characters all look samey (most of them are skeletons, after all), and the gameplay not only requires close contact for melee attacks but also provides bonuses when your troops stand close to one another, meaning that battles will often devolve into a mess of multiple characters all standing more or less on top of one another, making it difficult to see just what the heck is going on and necessitating you to highlight each character to get the full story.

It’s a pity this is the case, because this game does have an interesting approach to the genre, and makes use of some unique mechanics, such as being able to knock enemies off of cliffs to automatically defeat them, and lock arms with allies to avert getting knocked back yourself… but of course, as I just pointed out, this encouragement to lump everyone together is also part of the problem.

There is another issue, as well – this game makes use of a bizarre button layout that takes some getting used to, including an insistence on swapping the “confirm” and “cancel” buttons from the usual Nintendo Switch layout. There are no menu options to change this either, meaning players must either reassign the buttons on the hardware level, or just accept them as-is and get used to them. Far from ideal.

Don’t get me wrong, Skulls of the Shogun isn’t a terrible Turn-Based Strategy game, but multiple design choices result in it being a messy gameplay experience that makes it difficult to tell what’s going on in battle, and the button layout just adds to this confusion. Fans of the genre will still find this game to be fairly unique and possibly worth a look, but for most this game is too frustrating to bother with.

tl;dr – Skulls of the Shogun is a Turn-Based Strategy game that has you taking the role of a feudal Japanese warlord gathering troops to take over the afterlife, with the Switch version including all DLC from previous releases. This game does a few fairly unique things for the genre, but multiple design choices make it a messy, frustrating affair where it’s too difficult to see what’s going on. Genre fans may find this worthwhile, but most are better off skipping it.

Grade: C

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