That sound you hear, is the sound of a classic fighting game franchise dying a horrible horrible death. Samurai Showdown may have not been the most popular fighting game franchise out there, but I still remember dropping quarter after quarter into my local Neo-Geo cabinet just for a chance to get down with some samurai action. Now, Samurai Showdown has attempted to catapult itself into current generation gaming with Samurai Showdown Sen. Unfortunately, it forgot its parachute and landed flat on its face.

Classic Samurai Showdown was a 2-D affair. Sure, it was a Street Fighter clone, but it was a fun Street Fighter clone with some interesting and innovative ideas. Staying true to tradition, Samurai Showdown Sen is also a clone of a more popular fighting game, however, this time the simple 2-D mechanics of Street Fighter have been ditched for the tactical 3-D mechanics of Soul Calibur.

It doesn’t work. It’s practically the same affair through and through, with a nearly identical button layout. We get horizontal slash, vertical slash, and kick buttons, just like Soul Calibur, but we also get a special button which is used to trigger more Samurai Showdown-esque moves, which are now totally ineffective. The game unfortunately ditched a lot of what made it cool in its transition into 3-D. All the cool special moves that characters had available to them have been stripped down or removed entirely. Projectiles and flashy anime-style attacks are now rare and replaced with stiff moving melee combat that is wholly unbalanced. Mashing gets you everywhere in this game. Even high-level play is easily disassembled by mashing and luck. Pressing certain combinations of attack buttons at once makes your character do slow strong moves that are nearly impossible to land, but do anywhere from a third to a half of your life in damage. Most of the combat in the game comes down to being cheap and cheesy, with fast moves spammed over and over and over again in the hopes that your opponent won’t be able to react. It’s profoundly stupid.

There are a couple of leftovers from previous Samurai Showdowns. For example, the rage meter still exists, and filling it completely (by getting hit) allows you to go into rage mode, which makes you a better fighter all around. This is kind of cool, but it’s nothing new. It may have been an innovation back in the day, but now it’s just the standard balancing act that desperation moves have always been in games like these. Speaking of desperation moves, you can do your characters signature move while in rage mode, but most of these are just plain old combo strings, and are wholly unimpressive.

Sen suffers from the same King of Fighters XII problem of simply not offering enough to do. There is a story mode, a versus mode, a practice mode, and a survival mode, but beyond that you are shit out of luck. You can take the fight online, but the online community for this game is basically non-existent. Considering the current sales numbers, online capability won’t do much to extend Sen’s life. The servers are all ghost towns, and there is little to no hope of any sort of cohesive meta-game evolving out of Sen’s fairly broken battle system.

If there is anything redeeming about the game, it is its art style. The character portraits on the character select screen are quite beautifully drawn and are a treat to look at. The in-game graphics are pretty dull and don’t even match up with the awesome anime-style portraits you see on the characters select screen. However, the game does manage to be stylistic in the way of animation. You can in fact cut people in half, dismember them, and end their lives in all sorts of gruesomely graphic ways. I’d be lying if I said that ending a match by cutting my opponent’s head off wasn’t immensely satisfying. The soundtrack of the game is also fairly decent. It is filled with traditional Japanese music remixed only enough to give the game a heart pounding feel. Plainly put, the game is very atmospheric and is very nice to look at, but that doesn’t do anything to redeem it for its horrible battle system.

If Samurai Showdown Sen was a game in any other genre, I would say that its visual style alone would make the game worth renting. Unfortunately, Sen is a fighting game. The backbone of a good fighting game is a good fighting system, and Sen simply doesn’t have one. It was a big mistake to make the jump into 3-D with this franchise. Honestly, this just proves that SNK franchises can’t be made into good 3-D fighters. Eventually, they will either stick with 2-D games, or run out of franchises to ruin. However, for now, you can totally skip over Samurai Showdown Sen. It’s just not worth it.

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