Being a fan of a classic crawlers, I was first impressed as the game is actualization of something between Dungeon Master and Wizardry experience. For a long time, it kept me with "maybe I will get a bit more far and it gets better", but no, I am quitting after 12 hours, lost endless, but inevitable and somehow frustrating fights. It is quite a pity, it just feels like authors took too big piece in 30 hours game since minor design flaw seize it already not even in half.
As a huge fan of game's style movies, I strongly appreciate that Flying Wild Hog revived and brought this poetics into a computer game. I would overlook also a medicore gameplay. But here, the gameplay somewhere around fifth episode accumulates so much repetition that it become frustrating and significantly ruin the experience. Basically you are applying still the same think on same sequences of enemies where winning is kind of a random, again and again. Moreover, the story is somehow uninteresting, even the (good) black and white samurai movies always had something more than the style, e.g., "Seppuku" was more realistic and had social and psychological overlap, "Kiru" put more stress on humorous aspect and so on. Here, the story is so bland that it does not even motivate to go further, or to care about characters. It is a pity, with a more various and better designed gameplay and more interesting story, this would be my personal game of the year.
