Capcom published, Arc Systems developed title Sengoku Basara X just came out for the PS2 about a month ago in Japan. Being a fighting game enthusiast, I had the opportunity to check it out.

Based off of Capcom’s Sengoku Basara franchise, it takes the characters and environment from the series and puts them in a Guilty Gear-esque game. It’s got pretty colors, one-hit kills, ‘dust’ attacks–just about everything that is in Guilty Gear. The people at work mistook it for Guilty Gear and I had to tell them how horrible their vision was. Then they proceeded to kick my ass–in the game, that is.

Something that isn’t in the Guilty Gear games is the ‘Engun system’. Throughout the match, players can call out ‘assist characters’ to do many things, such as assisting in combos, countering opponent attacks, and my personal favorite: super move assists. Crazy shit happens! I love crazy shit!

Plus, the characters here are very similar to Guilty Gear’s. For instance, there’s Oichi, who is a combination of Zato-1/Eddie and Zappa. She can get possessed and black goo pops out of nowhere. Then we got Sanada Yukimura, who has a similar color palette to Sol Badguy. “Just because he looks like him, doesn’t mean he plays like him.” WRONG. He does fire uppercuts and other cheap shit, just like Badguy. Sadly, the roster is very small: 12 characters (not including the ‘boss’ character, if there is one).

So basically, I’m playing Guilty Gear with badass-looking samurai dudes who duke it out one-on-one to decide the fate of Japan? Sounds pretty sweet!