Why You Should Care About Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes

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.

The first improvement is that everything is smoother. What that means is, for starters, the game stays around 60 frames per second -- an always-speedy display that most of the Warriors games have maintained, but the latest Samurai Warriors for Wii doesn't even manage it. It's also smoother because as you run and slash (or punch and kick) enemies, it feels like a hot knife through butter. You can gain some great momentum, and unlike in Koei's games, it's pretty easy to turn on a dime and swing the camera around to where you want to be.

Second, downtime is reduced. Warriors games are known for their large levels, where you often have to gallop clear across the landscape to get where you're needed with very little actual fighting in between (considering that you can just run past the grunts). In Basara, the levels are usually kept at the same size -- a handful of camps with only short paths in between them, keeping the action steady. You're not waiting as much when you're fighting, either: Say you're up against one of the enemy generals, who has a large life bar, and needs to be smacked around more than a few times. If you hit him with enough combos, he'll fall on his back. At that point, in a Warriors game, you can't always kick someone when they're down. In Basara, you don't have to wait for the guy to get up before you can hit him again; there's almost always a way to keep him in the air.