Samurai Shodown: Warriors Rage

Samurai Shodown: Warriors Rage, known as New Chapter of Samurai Spirits, Strange Tale of the Swordsman: Revival of the Blue and Red Blade (～サムライスピリッツ新章～剣客異聞録 甦りし蒼紅の刃 ~Samurai Supirittsu Shinshō~ Kenkaku Ibunroku: Yomigaerishi Sōkō no Yaiba) in Japan, is the seventh game in SNK's Samurai Shodown series of fighting games.

Continuing onward from the storyline set forth in the two Hyper Neo Geo 64 games in the series, Samurai Shodown: Warriors Rage takes place 20 years later, with a dramatically revamped cast, and was released solely for the Sony PlayStation. Though other SS games have followed it, it is chronologically the last game in the series, and is the only game in the series proper to not get an arcade release.

The first and most audacious change is the revamped character roster, which removed every playable character from previous games, with the exception of Haohmaru, who was now a middle-aged man, sporting a beard and missing his trademark mop of black hair. Hanzo Hattori also appeared, though it was not actually the same man, but rather the original Hanzo's son, Shinzo, who had assumed his name. Nicotine Caffeine, Nakoruru and Rimururu also played a role in the story, but were not in a playable form. Every other character was a new design.

The game was also very plot-intensive, with more than two dozen characters, each one having a reasonably significant role to play in the story.

Though the game was still in 3D, SNK sought to further diminish the role of the third dimension, making all gameplay on a straight line, with no movement along the Z-axis, beyond a basic dodge. Two buttons controlled weak and strong slashes, a third controlled kick attacks, and the fourth was used for dodges.

The game introduced a new lifebar system, which was subdivided into three sections. The first "round" of the fight lasted until one person was drained of all three sections, upon which one section of the bar would disappear, and the remaining two would refill. Once those two were drained, the second section would be dropped, with the last one refilled. This was punctuated by a pause in the action, during which the other player would go through a taunt animation. The match was finally over when one player had been drained of this last section of life.

Aside from the lifebar system, gameplay was relatively straightforward.

Source: Wikipedia, Samurai Shodown: Warriors Rage , available under the CC-BY-SA License.