I bought Bushido Blade 2 simply because it was made by the same company who made the Final Fantasy games, Squaresoft (now known as Square-Enix). My teenage mind was that shallow. To pimply me, Squaresoft could do no wrong, having blessed me with Super Nintendo classics like Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG.


From there, the company's exclusivity to the Sony Playstation ended my relationship with Nintendo, a break up that lasted well over a decade, up until a few years ago when I was given a Wii for my birthday.


Bushido Blade 2 is a dead simple fighting game. There are two rival schools of assassins and they stab each other senseless all over Japan using all manner of sharp objects. What made this game (and its predecessor, which I never played) unique at the time was the fact that there were no life bars. Instead, it was “real”: You get stabbed in the arm, you lose use of that arm. Get stabbed in the legs, you hobble or have to roll around on the ground. Get stabbed in the face, you die. END OF GAME.


While you start with only 6 playable characters, you could unlock more in the story mode. But they were pretty interchangeable. I remember this game being a big hit at parties, because it could pit a novice - happy to just mash away on buttons and hope for a quick kill – against a calculating expert, and the matches could last ten seconds or ten minutes.


Graphically, it doesn't really hold up in our hi-def gaming age, but few games from the original Playstation do. The backgrounds would flicker in and out of existence, but many were interactive. A duel through a bamboo thicket was given extra atmosphere as bamboo poles were felled during heated exchanges of cold steel.


It was easy to play and a lot of fun, and that's pretty much all I ask out of a game.


Anybody else remember this classic?