All right, I'll admit it. I was a complete and total
Bushido Blade addict. I played the hell out of that game. I don't generally like fighters -- something about button combos and hordes of character just doesn't really impress me. But the deep gameplay of
Bushido Blade had me hooked, and the fact that you could kill someone with a single well-placed swipe impressed the hell out of me. Sure, there were a few cheap character combos (Mikado with the nodachi, anyone?), but the game was highly enjoyable.
Kengo, by the same developers, has lost a lot of that charm. It's gained a little back of its own, but in the end, the game is an unfulfilling experience. There's some fun to be had here, but you have to dig pretty deep to find it. I can distance myself from the fun I had with Bushido Blade, but that doesn't make this game any better -- it just leaves me with nothing else to compare it to.
There are three play modes in Kengo. The core of the game is in the single-player experience. After picking one of three warriors, you must pick the dojo you wish to go to school at. Each dojo has its own set of moves, and you should pick one whose moves compliment your warrior. After picking your dojo, the game proper starts.
The first part of the game consists of training against the members of your own dojo. After doing a few quick training lessons, you go up against a series of students, until you eventually fight the master of the dojo himself. You can also fight other dojos, to learn their skills and get their special swords. As you fight opponents, you gain points in a number of statistics, which control how fast you are, how strong your attacks are, and other such goodies.
To raise the maximum level in these stats, you must do various training exercises. These are a departure from the actual combat, and I found them to be the most entertaining part of the game.
The combat consists of a single attack button, a block button, a parry button, and a 'ki' button. You can have up to four stances at a time, and you execute the three moves in a stance by tapping the attack button. There are a few more subtleties to attacking, but that's the gist. As you fight, your ki meter goes up and down. Once you have an 'excellent' sword, you can use its built-in ki attack and do some major damage to your opponents.
The core problem with the game comes from the shoddy combat engine. Facing your opponent is an exercise in futility, and I can't tell you how many battles consist of swinging past an opponent, turning, and swinging past again. It's woefully inaccurate, and downright silly to watch. Because almost every move consists of these combos, you'll find yourself wailing on thin air a frighteningly large amount of the time.
There's also no real overarching storyline to the single-player mode. You raise your stats, you fight other dojos, you participate in a tournament. That's just about it.
The other two modes -- a versus mode and a tournament mode -- are more amusing. In the tournament mode, you can use pre-built characters or load your own, and you fight much the same way that you do in any fighting game -- one on one until it ends. The versus mode lets you fight your buddies, and you can use your loaded characters here as well. Both modes are somewhat entertaining, but if you want multiplayer action of the bushido sort, I suggest you stick in your copy of Bushido Blade. (Damn, I referred to it!)
