Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

After waiting for years for this game to come out on ps3 (in North America), I finally get a chance to get my hands on a copy.. well not literally cause the Way of Samurai 4 can only be downloaded through the Playstation Network. Anyways, as a HUGE fan of the samurai way, I was thoroughly hyped up for this game expecting it to be the best samurai experience to date. So as soon as the download (and install/updates) completed I jumped right in and played for the whole afternoon. The game starts out with your character travelling by boat to the city of Amihama and immediately shows the situation/problem at hand. The few beginning cut scenes show the Japanese government working a trade with the Western (the British) people then they are disrupted by the "Disciples of Prajna" and their cannons. The Prajnas are those who dislike the change and want to keep things Japanese. The typical people wanting change vs the people hating change. You then land on shore and a lady asks you to do something about the fight thats about to happen because you look like a samurai. Not quite sure why she would as you to join the fight but I'm guessing its because samurais back then are badass and would just join any fight they see cause they can!! (but mostly cause they have sharp swords with them as well). Upon the lady telling you to man up and fight, you are given options to fight or not. This is pretty much an important part of the game as throughout the game you are given choices that would affect the story. The story goes as you decide to either help the British (who can speak perfect Japanese but will occationally throw in a word of english like HEY!), the Prajnas or the Japanese shogunate. Of course everyone has their own agendas but they all eventually lead up to a tornament which you have to win to advance to the ending. This can be done within a couple hours and the first ending can be acheived right after you win. Since there are mutiple endings playing through the game again is a must. You do keep everything after you restart, make sure you save and load the save to start to keep everything you had.
The gamplay itself is quite fun, there are mutiple styles of sword fighting, spear fighting and hand to hand which is a good thing because it keeps the gameplay fresh after a couple of play throughs. There are about 3-5 different styles of each combat and must be used often for them to upgrade and perform more devastating moves (like Dynasty warriors). There are many different types of swords you can get although the biggest different you see are the names, you really have to get close to the screen to see the different in colour/handle/shealth in the different swords. The damage of the swords can be upgraded and you can also create swords by disassembling them via the blacksmith. There are different missions to take apart form the story which are mainly deliveries and killing people, the night crawling mini game is really a joke so if you want to buy the game for that I suggest you not. You can get your own dojo and keep your pupils in the different run throughs but the challengers get annoying as they get more frequent (your pupils can die if you don't show up for the challenge).
There isnt much instuctions as they just teach you how to attack and use your special. You can of have to learn the different things as you go which i think is pretty good as i hate sitting for 20 minutes to go through the tutorials. Overall the game is pretty decent if your in love with samurai and their sword fighting. I did get addicted to collecting different swords (the sword drops are better if you play at a higher difficulty) and trying to upgrade the different styles by fighting. Not a very long game unless you go through the side quests (which are the same in different runs) and the Japanese audio with English subtitles are standard (and i wont have it any other way). For $39.99 I still think this game is a bit pricey (as it was release in japan like two years ago) but if you have some time and money to spare this game is a good experience because killing people with samurai swords is just plain fun!


graphics are outdated since it was released in Japan like 2 yrs ago,
audio is what you expect in a jap ver converted to NA ver
gameplay is good as it dosent glitch as much as i thought it would
Overall
7.5 out of 10