Way of the Samurai 4

You start with your aimless samurai sailing to town, fortunately there just happens to be an all out war going on at the harbour when you arrive with most the main players in town showing up. You slash a bunch of fools, then get to "choose a side". The game wastes no time in setting up exactly what's going on here.

Sadly, no side feels completely sympathetic... But the British have Jet Jenson and Melinda Megamelons...

Later some kind of head honcho came to town, I interrupted his procession shouting "GIVE ME BACK MY MONEY!", he turned around and said chastised me for being rude... Seconds after one NPC went crazy at the guy next to him for daring to look up at the lord...

I also decided to brandish my sword... He just walked off and I had to fight a bunch of guards.

Which is my bigger disappointment. For as much as it would break things in previous games and leave you at a point where you really couldn't progress. Randomly attacking important NPCs in WotS4 will lead to a battle... Where if you get them low on health they run away, or just straight up be invincible.

There's one guy who I had to fight for storyline purposes... 4 days in a row we fought and he'd flee in terror of me. Only to react the next day like it was the first time we'd met.

So while it seems like there are lot of decisions to make throughout the story, as evidenced by one of the menu options being "look at all the story branches", it feels like you have less freedom as the player than compared to previous games in the series. The game actively tries to prevent you from breaking the main story, which really should be a positive, but their solution being to just have people run away feels like quite a cop out.

That said, the main storyline is interesting enough to keep your attention for at least a playthrough, though I only saw two branches though (one of which suddenly ended the game before anything at all was resolved). But the leaps of logic the game expects you to go along with are absolutely absurd. One cutscene was a sombre scene talking about how most of our forces had been annihilated, so in the next we decided to go attack someone's base... To the point where I was really debating whether this group needed new leadership... But I was worried about the game punishing me for trying to insert my own intentions into the storyline but just locking me out of the story.

Why? Because after a situation where I'd done something that meant I couldn't see the current storyline to it's conclusion the game took me to a boat and said "hey, just end the game", when I said no, it just sends enemies after you and all "story" related buildings were permanently closed off.

They try to give you a bunch of side content to do while pursuing the main story beats. But it's stuff like "Go deliver my dad's lunch", "Go find my dog", or chat up an old lady... Stumbling across that and accidentally succeeding, did admittedly bring a couple of laughs. Sadly I missed our midnight rendezvous... Because the way of keeping track of these quests is through the start menu... Which is just laborious to navigate. In a way everything's logically grouped, but in a way that each time you have to stop and think about where exactly what you're after is hidden away.

You can also get arrested and undergo a "torture" minigame... That has no bearing or importance on anything... It's just dumb.

The game has a wealth of unlockables, allowing you to decorate your samurai as everything from the ronin he is... to one of the villagers... to one of the bodyguards... Or like a cat. The rewards don't really compensate for the amount of time they take to unlock. Which is a lot of time, I have no idea why they think I'm going to replay the game that many times just to unlock the equivalent of "thug's jock strap". They should just have a button that says "look, I don't have 100 hours to dedicate to this".

You'll get a whole bunch of items, but the cumbersome menu makes using them (and you can only use some in certain circumstances), especially in battle, far more awkward than it needs to be. Even worse is the weapon "quick selection"; you can carry a whole bunch of weapons, but have 3 "equipped" at once, which means using a shoulder button (I forget which) then up and down on the d-pad to switch between these three... But trying to use this while battling because you've just broken your sword leaves you with about 5 seconds of "free hit" time for the enemy because even if you could concentrate on the enemy and the menu, you're stuck in the menu so can't respond to the battle... It's just incredibly short-sighted decisions like that, which while perfectly functional in isolation, really destroy the flow of the game.

Though this isn't helped by the fact the controls are incredibly stiff and awkward, which led to me accidentally booting one of my NPC comrades and him aborting the story mission I had started. The camera is also terrible, it constantly gets caught behind fences or buildings, leaving you with no view of yourself and while you can rotate it, it insists on returning back to where it was the moment you let go of the stick.

You gain more weapons by taking them from your fallen opponents... But when I came across a British guy and tried to nab the rifle from his corpse, the game just gave me a straight up "nu-uh, you don't know how to use this". Which makes sense, but if you're going to make that distinction, why can I expertly use all sword/spear/unarmed? I don't care if my samurai fell flat on his rear end if I tried to use it, but denying me it at all until I kill some who drops a book that tells me how to use them is kind of ridiculous.

The game certainly has its shortcomings, but I was able to slash a guy in a way that made him do quadruple flying backflips through the air. So it's not all bad.

The game does have some charm, and it's willingness to do some silly stuff is appreciated, but it doesn't feel like it goes far enough with it, and in the situations where it does (the torture stuff etc.) it just feels hokey and lame, to the point of being kind of cringe-worthy, the worst culprit of this being the aforementioned "head honcho" who just does evil things because he's a complete caricature of an evil boss, but just leaves you wondering why everyone in the village hasn't just signed up with the extremists.

But sadly that charm isn't not enough to allow me to overlook that the combat gets incredibly repetitive and storyline just too nonsensical to enjoy. It's fun to prod at the game and explore different storyline options... For a while... But for the sheer amount of it that the game wants you to do to experience everything, it just doesn't provide enough enjoyment or incentive to make doing so rewarding.