The Kuki brothers are fantastic successors to the feud between Haohmaru and Genjuro.
Samurai Shodown is a bit famous in no small part due to it being the first 2-D weapon based fighting game. It was so good that it spawned 6 direct sequels, not counting special re-releases, as well as a 3-D rendition in Samurai Shodown 64. Warriors Rage is a sequel to the sequel of Samurai Shodown 64, a couple of games that never made it outside Arcades... which makes it all the more baffling if you don't know that, since the game's intro starts with a '...20 years later'. 20 years from when? The plot only gets more senseless the more you get into it. And it's pure SNK translation brilliance.Booting up the game offers a few different modes: Story, in which you take any one character throughout a ton of battles in order to get an ending, Attack Mode, which is a trial mode which can be used to power up your favorite character, Battle(VS Cpu or player) and a practice mode. The game is made up of 23 characters, but more than half of them are clones or pseudo clones, four of them being useless filler characters that don't even get special moves. As for the characters... this game features some of the best character designs the franchise has ever seen, and most characters are newcomers, Haomaru making an appearance as an old man and Hattori Hanzo's successor being the only familiar faces. During the Story Mode you'll occasionally come across characters interacting via text boxes... and it's glorious, SNK is infamous for their horrible translations, and this is no exception.
Yuda will make no sense unless you've learnt about Samurai Shodown 64. And even then his existence isn't properly explained.
Gameplay is a mix of old and new. While the game made the jump to 3-D, there's no sidestepping, although the circle button works as a dodge button, in case you don't want to parry or dodge. Attacks come in three varieties, Strong, Weak and Kick and inputting different directions on the D-Pad before pressing an attack button produces Special and Super moves. As per the franchise's standards, combos are not the focus of the game, but rather waiting for openings and profiting from them. This is a slow paced game, so be wary. Many reviewers at the time took issue with it, but I enjoyed the game's pace. The way the life bar works is also relatively interesting, being divided into three segments. Once you lose all your health, it completely recharges but only up to the second tier. Lose all your health and your life bar recharges up to a single tier, lose all your health now and you lose the battle. It's an interesting mechanic, I think.One of the game's biggest issues comes from unlocking characters, unlocking all 23 means going through the game with 22 different characters, including the lame filler characters, which are weaker and more limited, moveset wise, than the others. And the problem with Story Mode... is that it's rather lengthy, not helped by the fact that the game loves to pit you on a survival match against up to 5 of these filler characters, back to back, without restoring your health. These take a long time to complete, and there's about two of these on any playthrough. Playing the game was fun, unlocking characters was not.
You'll have grown tired of Oboro's Amazons by the time you're done with the game.
I loved my time with Warriors Rage. The mechanics are fun, and most characters are fantastic designs, plus, I love it when fighting games get daring enough to ditch old characters and replace them with newer ones. And I can see why reviewers had issues with the game back in the day, Fighters were becoming niche, and they wanted the next flashy, fast paced thing with the ability to string together long combos being the norm.8.0 out of 10
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