ACA NEOGEO Samurai Shodown II

Genre: Fighting Game

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local / Online), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Samurai Shodown II is a Fighting Game released in 1994 in arcades, on the NEOGEO AES home console, and the NEOGEO CD console, later receiving ports to numerous other platforms. In the current day, this is probably SNK’s second best-known Fighting Game franchise after the King of Fighters games, and this is the second game in the series, with this release of the game on Nintendo Switch coming in 2018.

What a huge improvement over the first game! The controls are tighter and more responsive, with special moves much easier to execute, the roster has been expanded to 15, and combat is a lot quicker. What’s more, this is the first Fighting Game to ever use parry moves, and there are other new gameplay mechanics as well. The sprite scaling is still rough and this game isn’t quite on par with modern entries in the genre, but it has aged much better than its predecessor.

This release of the game includes a new “Hi-Score Mode” that challenges players to score as much as they can in one run before seeing a game over screen. There is also a new “Caravan Mode” that does much the same, but with the limit being five minutes. In addition, this release of the game includes both English and Japanese versions, and gives players a decent array of options, including various display options, sound options, challenge modifiers, button mapping, and online leaderboards.

While these settings are nice, there’s one setting noticeably absent here that was present in the Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection – the ability to map combinations of button inputs to one button. Given how this series assigns important commands to multiple simultaneous button inputs, this is a glaring omission, and a big point in favor of getting the collection.

In the end, Samurai Shodown II is a solid, if somewhat dated, Fighting Game that’s still enjoyable today. However, if you’re considering buying this, you may want to instead consider getting the Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection. It will cost you more than just getting this one game, but you’ll save on buying multiple games in the series, plus it has the better control options and bonus content you just won’t find here. However, if for some reason you only want the second Samurai Shodown, and don’t mind missing out on all of that, you may find this game worth getting.

tl;dr – Samurai Shodown II is a Fighting Game that is a huge improvement over the previous game, with better controls, an expanded character roster, and new gameplay mechanics. It’s still not quite on par with modern Fighting Games, but this is still a solid entry in the genre. However, this release lacks control options and bonus content in the Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection, so you may want to consider getting that bundle instead. However, if you’re just looking to buy the one game, this is a pretty decent choice.

Grade: B-

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