Sengoku 3

When Sengoku 3 came out in 2001, myself and the rest of the Neo-Geo fan community were more than a little confused. Not only were beat-em-up style games out of fashion, but the 2D fighting games that ran these games out of fashion were now also seen as passé. The world had moved on to 3D by this point, and legacy 2D games like this were still about a decade away from a nostalgia fueled resurgence. Despite this, the Neo-Geo was still massively popular in a few spots around the world (like South America), so even during their bankruptcy and buyout, SNK/Playmore was still releasing games for the then 11 year old hardware. 

Sengoku 3's developer, Noise Factory, was a ghost developer in the 90's that would either create games for a larger publisher or provide assistance in development where there was an employment gap. Aside from Sengoku 3, they either developed or helped develop other notable Neo-Geo titles like Rage of the Dragons, Power Instinct: Matrimelee, and Metal Slug 3 - 5 (they only contributed to the sound design in the third Metal Slug game). Despite little fanfare around its release, Sengoku 3 was widely praised by critics at the time for its fantastic sprite work, generous animation, great music, and deep mechanics (for a beat-em-up). Despite so many good points, the game was also criticized for a lack of enemy variety, uneven difficulty, and slow-pace. What's it like playing Sengoku 3 almost 20 years later? Let's find out.

Sengoku 3 is the third and final game in SNK's beat-em-up series that helped launch the Neo-Geo hardware a decade earlier. Despite this, Sengoku 3 is so radically different than its predecessors that it hardly feels like part of that series. Rather than the player having the option to temporarily change into a spirit helper during gameplay, Sengoku 3 has you choose from four immediately selectable ninja at the outset of the game. Two of the bosses you encounter on your journey will eventually join your cause, so if you loose all of your lives and continue you will have the option to choose from the two additional fighters along with the stock four. 

Another notable change from the structure of the first two games is that the player is no longer whisked away to alternate reality planes at various points along the stage paths. While these special challenges included some unique enemy types and other surprises that helped to break up the monotony of the adventure in the prior two titles, they are completely missing from this game.

While the focus on the prior games was mostly on variety of enemies and locals, the focus in this third installment is on giving a variety of attack options. Heavily inspired by the decade of fighting games that came out prior to this release, Noise Factory created a robust and deep system of attacks, special moves, and combos. The A button is your weapon attack, the B button is your melee attack, the C button is jump, and the D button throws a projectile. The player can mix the weapon and melee attacks to create long and impressive combo strings that feel a bit more like how you put together attack strings in a modern "stylish-action games," like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, rather than the auto-combos of most other games in this genre. 

Along with the normal attacks, each character also possesses a few special attacks that can be done with a simple controller motion (like down, down, plus an attack button). These special attacks can be done either mid-combo or stand alone. Rather than having access to these powerful moves at all times, there is a blue meter that sits under the player's life bar that dictates how many stocks of special moves they have to use. You build meter by landing attacks, and the more consecutive attacks you land the faster your special move meter builds. Once you build a meter it is put into a "stock" denoted by a blue light next to the bar. Every character can hold two special move stocks. Due to the overwhelming power of these moves, the restrictions put in place by the special meter help to balance out the gameplay, and gives the player an incentive to learn the mechanics of the game in order to quickly build meter.

Ninjas like to throw things - anime taught me that. In Sengoku 3 every character begins the game with a limited stock of shurikens that they can use to attack enemies from a distance. These projectiles do little damage, but they can break the momentum of a distant enemy so you can better focus on the more immediate threats. Along the way you can collect other projectiles, like bombs, that have a larger attack radius. 

Movement and defensive options are about what you'd expect from a beat-em-up. Each character has a dash you execute by double tapping forward on the the controller. Out of a dash you can do one of two separate attacks depending on which button you press. You can also carry the momentum of your dash forward in your jump to reach further distances. Not that it's super useful in the confined spaces you fight in, but it can help you get out of trouble in a pinch. There are no real defensive options rather than your ability to break enemy combos with fast melee attacks, or using a projectile to stagger the enemy. 

The pace of the game is slow, I mean really slow. At the outset of the game, the player can choose from three different paths - one is marked as easy and the other two are hard. When you finish each stage you are taken back to the select screen to choose the next stage for your adventure. Each stage takes no less than 20 minutes to complete, but usually 25 minutes or more. While this doesn't sound all that bad, there isn't a lot to do other than walk a few feet, fight a dozen pallet-swapped enemies, walk a few more feet...you get the idea. 

While you may be thinking, "this sounds like every other beat-em-up I've ever played", the slow pace of battles and the high HP of even the most common enemy bog down what should be a brisk arcade experience. Enemy hit boxes are also not robust enough to catch enemies if you are just above or below them, making lining up clean hits more frustrating than it should be which puts you in constant risk as the enemies can still hit your hit-box from the precarious situations. This is probably the game's biggest flaw.

Despite the game's mechanics and pacing being uneven, Sengoku 3's presentation is mostly on point. From the stylized intro sequence, to the character select screen, and to the primary stage artwork, this is a handsome game. The character sprites are also large, fluidly animated, and highly detailed. While the game is a looker, you can tell the majority of development resources went to creating the player avatars and little to the enemy design. There are only a handful of normal enemy types you'll meet along your journey, and some of these enemies are just slight tweaks to the base enemy design. Even though everything looks good and animates well enough, the lack of originality in enemy variety stands out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the visuals. 

Sadly, due to there being only a handful of stages on offer, there are only a handful of music tracks. Thankfully, the music that is there is fantastic and is well worth a listen outside of the game. Sound effects are decent as well, with impactful melee crunches and satisfying sword slashes. There is a little voice work, and samples are clean, but it's nothing notable outside of some grunts and yells you'd expect from this type of game.

Sengoku 3 isn't a bad game, but I wouldn't call it a great game either. Despite some deep fighting game-like mechanics, the slow pace and lack of variety that permeate the adventure makes the game feel more like a slog to get through compared to the litany of beat-em-ups that came before it. The Neo-Geo has never been the defacto choice for solid games in this genre, with most being "passable" at best. Sengoku 3 fits this mold well. It tries to be a little different than its contemporaries, but it lacks the precision execution to truly be a genre great - despite its good looks. It's also radically different from the prior two games in the series and would have been better marketed in 2001 as a stand-alone release.

If you are after this game on real hardware, you need to save up your pennies. While the game was originally released in a decent quantity, the game did not sell all that well and enterprising modders would scoop up multiple copies on the cheap to use as conversion sack carts (read about that here). Because of this, the game is in short supply now and prices in the modern retro game market have skyrocketed to well over $2000 for either a Japanese or US release on AES. Some recently sold copies have gone for $2800 or more. On MVS the game is much cheaper, but is still prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of retro game collectors at $400 or more. Thankfully you can get the game on the Switch and other modern digital store fronts via Hamster's Arcade Archives series for $8 or so - and that is how I recommend you play it. 

For those of you building an AES collection, my advice is to steer clear of this game. The absurd price just isn't worth the amount of time you'll invest in it. If you have money to burn, and you just want to the game to sit on a shelf in another plastic box to look pretty, I suppose the packaging design is stylish enough to garner some conversation when friends come over to check out your shelf-collection. This is one of those "high-end collector" only games. If you need a Sengoku game, save up your pennies and get Sengoku 2 instead. It still costs an outrageous $600-$900, but you will get much more bang for your buck if you actually plan on playing your Neo-Geo collection. That said, there are no real "must-have" beat-em-ups on the hardware, so my advice is to spend your money on the much more solid fighting game library instead.