It’s like Samurai Warriors, but good.
That’s what I keep telling (or having to tell) people every time I’m spotted playing Capcom’s Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes. I’m not sure anyone wants to believe me, though. The days of beat-em-ups where you only needed two buttons are long gone — now it seems like everything you do in a game needs a purpose, and there’s the feeling that anything too simple needs to be 10 dollars at most. Plus, anything related to Koei’s Warriors franchise elicits kneejerk cynicism; it’s a laughing stock.
I understand the doubts, but it’s not Capcom’s fault. The Dynasty Warriors/Samurai Warriors series started off promising ten years ago, but they’ve made only incremental improvements since then, and considering their sequels now number in the double digits, leaving only the hardest-core fans to appreciate the ostensibly small changes, you get the aforementioned laughing stock. Capcom apparently realized they could do better, and so we got the Sengoku Basara series (which you may know as Devil Kings on PS2, its first installment — but this new game is actually Sengoku Basara 3). And there are plenty of things that make it better than Koei’s series.
