A PlayStation Classic

Bushido Blade booklet

While doing some tidying up I stumbled across a game booklet for a classic (sort of) PlayStation game: Bushido Blade. A 1997 release with advertisements for Final Fantasy 7, SaGa Frontier and Final Fantasy Tactics on the back cover. Pretty much a nostalgia trip.

It was a borrowed game of which I played as much as possible. From training mode to story mode, the game was filled with some interesting characters and a new (to me) fight system. At the time the only games that were sampled were played on the Super NES console as I didn't have a PlayStation at the time; or at least not yet.

Come graduation day I received a PSone as a gift from my brother and a Digimon World game; he took note of my interests. After getting the system setup, I took the game for an actual test run.

Game Modes

There were five (5) modes total: Training, Story, Versus, Slash and POV/Link. Training mode with this game was similar to practice of Killer Instict (SNES); the opponents did nothing but you could practice mastering combos. Versus mode is pretty straightforward while POV/Link mode puts your coordination skills to the test.

As POV suggests, you're playing a versus match through the eyes of your chosen character. If you wanted to share the POV experience with your friend, you would have to connect two PlayStation consoles together via a cable and go through the setup process at the back of the booklet. An interesting concept nonetheless but I pretty much stuck with the single player aspect of it.

Did I mention the interactive environments?

Out of all, Story and Slash mode are the most extensive in regards to time. Story mode follows your chosen character through a series of obstacles as they try to escape their current situation. One of the key things that caught my attention while playing is the fact that your progress will be hindered if you fight dirty.

By dirty I'm talking about hitting opponents while they're on the ground, striking them from behind and attacking while they're climbing on something. It took a while but the mechanics were wrangled and successful completion was accomplished. Too bad you couldn't unlock new characters unless I missed something back then.

Last but not least, the infamous Slash. During my first session, I completely missed the 100 opponents message. This session is pretty much a test of endurance for both the player and the chosen character. To make things even more challenging you're restricted to a single weapon: the katana.

Your task was to survive and defeat 100 opponents back-to-back all while trying to be careful as to not receive an injury. Why? Well, if you get injured you pretty much stayed injured until you're defeated.

Yeah, there were plenty of injuries received but the worse was taking a hit in the leg. At this point timing was everything and patience was key. The only other thing that's worse than a leg injury in this mode is getting trapped on the other side of the wall; an interesting glitch that provided some much needed shielding from opponents that were three times my size.

A Nice Find

Thinking back, this was one of three games within this genre played where I actually liked all the available characters and each character had two outfits: standard and specialty. Both were unique to the characters but the standard was more traditional in appearance while the specialty was more like armor or active wear. For the short time frame that the game was played, it was quite enjoyable if not challenging.

There was still a preference for racing and casual games at the time but this was a nice break if not learning experience for the different types of games you don't always run into. The game was returned long ago but they let me keep the booklet on top of gifting Crash Bash as compensation which was another win due in part to me playing the demo some months prior. So yeah, an interesting find among some things which include some game cartridges from back in the day.