Katana Kami: A Way of the Samurai Story Review
Another boss defeated; the mighty Nue fell to my feet. Seeing that my only path forward was to escape the mysterious Jikai dungeon that night, I entered the golden aura thinking my exit was secured. I was wrong.
My screen fell under a sepia tone all of a sudden. I transported to a familiar place, yet something felt off. I wandered toward the faint sounds of a baby crying. A samurai stood in my path. Before I gave him any time to respond, I unsheathed my blade and started my assault but quickly realized he was too much for me!
His health pool was massive. His strikes hurt a lot. I was outmatched, but lady luck blessed me that day. I noticed that my sword was able to make him flinch for just a second if both strikes connected.
I wouldn't last for another minute so I had to think fast. I scurried over to the side of this man's home into the bushes. Somehow, I was able to position him toward a corner that he'd have no escape from; it was like trapping a boxer at the corner of a ring and making sure he didn't have time to catch his bearings.
Stab. Stab. Dodge cancel. Stab. Stab. Dodge cancel.
This slow, but steady onslaught wracked up my combo. A higher combo count meant a higher rate of experience gained and an increased drop rate for items to appear. The man fell to my blade that was on the verge of breaking. The combo count was at a little over 200 meaning that I obtained an absurd amount of experience and the drop rate was at around 95%, so I saw a sword flying out of his body falling to the ground.
It was one of the best swords I found in my entire playthrough of Katana Kami: A Way of the Samurai - and I just barely started it. I wasn't sure if I was meant to beat that puzzling man at that point, though the whole sequence of events just had me thinking "Yep, this is certainly Way of the Samurai alright."
[...]
This is pretty much Katana Kami's gameplay loop and doesn't deviate from it all that much. There are multiple endings, albeit not as much as past titles. Its biggest selling point is how engaging the combat can be once you've found a set of weapons that you enjoy controlling. Being a small-scaled spin-off did hamper some of its more ambitious ideas. Nevertheless, Katana Kami: A Way of the Samurai Story isn't quite the Way of the Samurai game I wanted but that doesn't make it terrible; there is just an untapped well of potential that it ultimately fails to reach though.
Score: 6/10
