Kengo: Legend of the 9 is all about Samurai and swords in ancient Japan. You go around cutting up the bad guys and hunting down other Samurai. How could that go wrong? Well, there are quite a few ways.

On the plus side, one of those ways isn't really the graphics. While they aren't BioShock or Halo 3 pretty, they aren't quite last gen either. The character models of the nine Samurai tend to look pretty good and detailed, but the tons of random bandits and grunts that you will face in any given level feel a bit flatter. As for the environments, I had mixed feelings. Water seemed to look real good, and textures were very well done, but ultimately, everything was just really repetitive (something this game suffers a lot from). You will find yourself in an area to fend off the dozens of enemies that are about to attack you and you feel like you have a lot of space, but when you actually try to explore the area, you will find that the locations are actually very confined.

Audio isn't that big of an issue either. The background music tends to be soft and soothing and I don't recall getting annoyed at random calls made by the enemies (except maybe the sound they made when they died). An interesting thing to note here is that all dialogue is in Japanese, so you are going to be reading some subtitles, that is, if you actually care about the game's storyline.

Unfortunately, it's in GamePlay where Kengo: Legend of the 9 suffers the most. The game offers four modes of play: Main Mode, Mission Mode, Combat Mode and Solo Contest Mode. Main Mode is where you will be spending most of your time. Here you choose one of the unlocked Samurai and start his/her quest. The quests are broken up into stages that will typically end with you fighting one of the other Samurai from the game. Most stages follow this pattern. You are told a bit of a story to explain why your character is where they are. You are suddenly attacked by a group of enemies. You then fight wave after wave of bad guys until the big guy for that stage steps out. The two characters have an interchange and then they fight. When you win, you go on to the next part of the story. Sure the game tries to break things up some by having you fight the boss first and having the other people trying to avenge the attack, but it always feels the same.

As you progress through stages, you are awarded points to be used to upgrade your character's stats and sword combos, and all the info about that character is then saved off so you can use that particular character in the other modes. Unless you get really good at this game and can rack up some major points, you won't be able to buy everything you want before the end of the character's quest, so you'll have to keep a mind on which combos you've unlocked along the way. Unfortunately, this game seems to miss a lot of little things. It would have been worlds better if in the Pause Menu, I could pull up the screen that showed me which moves I had and which ones I didn't. The game would have been much less of a button-masher during my first few matches if that were the case. As it was, I didn't even realize I had specific set-in-stone combos based on my stances until I beat the first Samurai and got to upgrade my character (a feat that took a while, but that's in the Difficulty section). Heck, even a simple short Training or Tutorial Mode would have been nice. Instead, you are just tossed to the dogs.

Mission Mode is a little different from Main Mode in that you aren't really following a story, just trying to achieve some goal. That goal is typically kill X amount of people in Y amount of time. You can use either the pre-rolled characters the game has prepared for you, or one of your own saves from the Main Mode. There isn't a whole lot to this; you just have to keep on killing the bad guys. Sure there are a few where you have to actively search for them, but that doesn't really add a whole lot of change to the game.

Combat Mode and Solo Contest Mode is basically the same thing. Combat Mode lets you load up a couple of your saved characters and have you and a friend (or A.I.) fight against each other, while Solo Contest is A.I. versus A.I. There isn't much to this mode, and I found it relatively quick to bore.

Like I said earlier, there are a lot of little things that are missing from this game. A lot of it feels like it is a rushed job and suffers from massive repetitiveness. So much so in fact that I doubt the average gamer will make it through his or her second story arch before they just stop playing it.

Kengo: Legend of the 9 is a hard game. I'm not going to beat around the bush here. It is, like most good fighters, a game that will take a lot of work to really make any kind of progress in. When I first popped it in, I set the difficulty to Medium (as I always do when starting a new game of any sort), chose the first character in the list and started his quest. After some fumbling, I got a rudimentary hold on the controls (I mean it guys, a training mode of some sort would have been nice!), I was able to clear the first stage ... that is to say, the bunch of enemies that come after you before one of the other Samurai. When I returned from the cutscene and had to face off against my first real Samurai, I got whipped. No matter which styles I switched to, which techniques I tried, I just couldn't win; heck, I rarely got an actual hit in. It was real disconcerting. Eventually I switched to Easy and tried again. I breezed through it all. In fact, in Easy mode, if I didn't beat the level the first time, it was almost always a victory the second time.

When I finished going through one of the stories in Easy Mode, I figured I had a pretty good handle on the game (the only real difference between the modes seemed to be how much damage my attacks did), so I retried my first match. No difference. After a lot of effort, I made very little progress in the Medium difficulty level and, as you would expect, even less in the hardest setting. This is a game that, if you want to complete all of the quests on all of the settings and complete all of the missions, then, like I said earlier, it will take a lot of time and commitment.

The controls of Kengo: Legend of the 9 are pretty basic to understand, but using them effectively will take practice and just button-mashing won't get you very far. You change targets with the Triggers and rotate through your different stances with the Bumpers. The (A) is used to guard with your sword while (X) is how you grapple.

Now comes the part that might get most people button-mashing, but is really the core of the game's fighting mechanics. Your attacks are the (Y) for verticals and (B) for horizontals. Each stance has one of each type to start off a combo. Typically, each stance starts you off with some basic YY or BB combo. But as you earn points, you can buy new moves that belong in your combos. So eventually the YYB combo can be used or even YBY or BBY. Knowing which combos you've unlocked and keeping a grip on which stance you are currently in will go a long way into getting good at this game. The biggest problem with this, like I mentioned in GamePlay, is that there is no way to pause your game and look up what moves you've unlocked, so you might find yourself relying on three or four combos over and over again, which of course adds to the overall mundane feeling of this game.

Kengo: Legend of the 9 is definitely not for everyone. It is one of those games that take a lot of time to master and until you do, you will find yourself playing through what seems like the same missions over and over again. On one hand, if you are interested in this type of game and you are looking for something that will take a lot of time to master, then Kengo might be for you; on the other hand, I can't personally see putting that kind of time into this particular title.