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Afro Samurai Review

Posted on 07. May, 2009 by Johnn0 in Games, Reviews

Swords, Violence, Cell Shaded Blood and the voice talents of Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Perlman and Kelly Hu, it seems that Afro Samurai has everything it needs to be nothing short of spectacular, but does the game live up to its spec sheet? Find out in our full review.

Based on the anime series of the same name the game follows Afro in his quest to avenge his father who was killed during a battle with “Justice” a gun wielding wierdo who decapitated Afro’s daddy right in front of little Afro’s eyes. Time has passed and Afro is now all grown up and quite the swordsman. The plot is a little more complicated than simply killing Justice, you see Justice is the Number 1 and in the world of Afro Samurai the Number 1 - who is said to have god like powers - can only be challenged by the Number 2. The game begins with Afro’s search for the No. 2 so that he can kill him and claim the No.2 headband.

Being based on an anime series you can imagine that the mothod of story telling does veer a little left of normal but never to a point that you don’t know what is going on, the story of avenging a fathers death may be a little tired but it works within this context and it does help instead of hinder the game.

The cast of Afro Samurai is fantastic, featuring Sammy Jackson, Ron Perlman and Kelly Hu and the quality of the performers really does show. Sammy J as the quirky Ninja Ninja is probably the best part of the game, athough he also voices Afro it is his role as Ninja Ninja that really stands out. Ron Perlman as Justice and Kelly Hu as Okiku / Otsuru are also worth mentioning. In short Afro Samurai nails the voice work and it really makes the experience that much better.

On the audio side of things the soundtrack has been put together by RZA and it is outstanding, it is mostly Hip Hop tracks with some electronic beats here and there but it really does work well, and I don’t even like Hip Hop. On the audio quality side though there were several occasions where the sound would stutter for a second or two mostly when the game was loading, its not the end of the world, but it is worth mentioning.

The superb sound is almost matched by the cell shaded visuals of Afro Samurai, in my opinion it doesn’t match the quality of Prince of Persia’s graphics but cell shading is awesome and Afro Samurai keeps the banner for this technique flying high. It is not perfect however and there were more than a couple framerate drops during my playthrough, never to a point where it becomes gamebreaking but again it must be mentioned.

The main focus of the game as you would imagine is the combat a.k.a killing mofo’s. The game offers up plenty of combo’s and in truth unless you purposely attempt to do them all, you won’t ever do even half of the amount of combo’s that are available to you. As with most other games of this nature you can make it through the game by simple button mashing. What Afro Samurai adds to the mix is what is calls Focus attacks, these are very powerful attacks that can literally slice your opponents in half when used correctly. It can be a lot of fun.

You gain XP by killing everyone who gets in your way and by the style in which you kill them, the problem with this system is that you cannot select what attacks you will learn or where your XP should go, things just get unlocked for you, some skills are neccessary for you to progress through the game but don’t worry if you get to a point where you need a certain skill to progress it will be automatically unlocked for you, it begs the question as to why this system was implemented in the first place.

There are good ideas here too, like body part poker. Chopping of limbs and heads of opponents will get you a card of that body part, you cut of the limbs to get a certain hand and I assume gain more XP depending on the hand that you get, but I don’t really know as if the game did explain it to me I obviously wasn’t paying attention.

The major problems in Afro Samurai come in the form of the camera. It is a problem for many games like this (Ninja Gaiden anyone?) but in this case it might be the most frustrating implementation I have ever used. You see by default the up/down, left/right actions are inverted, I hate inverted controls, I cannot use them. Some people will enjoy it ( I know Freak likes the invert) but for people like me it doesn’t work and it only serves to irritate. The Main menu lets you change the up/down control to regular but not the left/right control, this is inverted and we apparently just have to deal with it.

The camera also gives you really odd angles at times and it sometimes takes a bit out of the action as you have to move so that you can swing the camera back to an angle that allows you to see what is going on. The camera doesn’t help the platforming aspects of the game either which by itself isn’t that good anyway, fortunately there is not too much platforming but there is enough of it to realize that the game could have used some tweaking in this area.

The boss battles in Afro Samurai are enough to frustrate nearly anyone. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy a challenging boss, I hate it when the bosses are too easy or easily exploited but Afro Samurai’s bosses are sometimes so frustrating that I had to take a break every now and again to collect my thoughts. You will die cheaply, and by cheaply I mean that certain bosses have an instant kill attack that just whips your ass, oh and there is no mid-boss-battle checkpoints either. If you die during the third phase of the fight, then well unlucky, back to the start of the fight.

The game has little replay value as there is not much else to do, you do unlock a hard mode, but unless you want to see how frustrating those bosses can be on the higher setting there is not much reason to try it. Oh, there is another reason why you don’t need to play through the game again, there are NO Trophies in Afro Samurai, none, nada, nothing.

Conclusion
Afro Samurai is a game that at times will have you grinning like an idot due to the quips of Ninja Ninja, the blood and violence as well as the awesome soundtrack, but there are time when the camera and the sometimes unfair deaths during boss battles will have you cursing the developers for ever being born.

There are so many things in this game that could have been so much better, and as a result Afro Samurai will be remembered as a decent game instead of the awesome game it has the potential to be.

Score
Graphics	7.5
Sound	8
Gameplay	6
Overall	7 / 10

A big thank you to Megarom for making the game available for review.

Tags: Afro Samurai, Namco, Reviews