Today I bring once again a beat'em up and it's that, as I've said many times, the amount of games in this genre is absurd, and although many of these games don't innovate much with respect to their mechanics, others instead, due to their artistic style and graphic aspect, are able to stand out by far, even though in terms of their playability they are quite basic. Today's beat'em up, is once again under the seal of the great SNK, and this already gives us an idea of how it looks and graphic style.
Today's Retro Review is about: Sengoku 3.
As you all know, the games of the beat'em up genre have never stood out for having an extremely deep plot, in fact, they are quite basic, because the main aspect of this type of games is its playability, therefore most of the beat'em up games are based on a linear plot where our main objective is to go through hundreds of scenarios and defeat a whole horde of enemies. However, even though Sengoku 3 maintains that same line of argument, it has a rather interesting premise in my opinion.
Sengoku 3 tells us that his entire plot is based on a prophecy, this prophecy dictates that an entity called: "Soul of time" will come back to life when the "red moon" appears in the sky, with this rebirth the world will be in total chaos and destruction. But, in spite of how bad this prophecy sounds, there is another one that dictates in the same way, after the rebirth of the "Soul of Time", the ancient "Ninjas of Peace" will also revive, whose mission is to save humanity from this terrifying chaos. And with this, Sengoku 3, shows us the typical main characters of a game of the beat'em up genre. And although the story is still quite linear, the truth is that at least this premise is very interesting compared to other games of the same genre.
For people who have played a title that is under the SNK label, you know that this video game development company is characterized by having a great level in terms of graphics and over the years I have done many reviews of video games from this company that prove this. Therefore, it's not surprising that Sengoku 3 is a game with a much higher graphic level, with excellent character designs, quite large sprites and a good amount of details to see, very well recreated scenarios and with the minimum care in its drawing, and of course, obviously with many details in its backgrounds.
With respect to the character design, they are very different from each other, quite original and very well defined, obviously with respect to the character design, the main characters stand out very much, for logical reasons, and although the enemies also have quite good designs, the variety of enemy designs is not so high, so they are going to be repeated quite a lot during this adventure, but all this is compensated thanks to their excellent graphic and artistic style. The animations are very good, quite varied and fluid, just what is needed for a game of this genre.
The scenarios are also very varied and throughout this adventure we will be able to observe a large number of these, from cities, temples and typical Japanese villages, each with their respective details that make them stand out very much, very good quality in textures and color palette.
The sound section of Sengoku 3 is really quite good, in this game we are going to be able to witness a great set of tunes with a high quality composition. Most of the tunes are the typical traditional Japanese tunes. Throughout the game we will go to different countries and each of these countries has their respective melodies that represent them quite decently. Likewise the sound effects in general are really good and are necessary for this kind of games, when you hear the sound effects like: explosions, hits, even the sound of some magic powers that we can perform, are quite satisfactory.
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As is typical for games in the beat'em up genre, and as I've said many times before when reviewing a game of this kind, our main mission in Sengoku 3 is to go through a series of side stages and defeat all the enemies on screen in order to advance to the next one until we reach their respective final boss. But while the vast majority of beat'em up games don't change much, they depend on other factors to keep them from being monotonous, in the case of Sengoku 3, one of the aspects that stand out, as I mentioned earlier, is its graphical aspect, even though in terms of gameplay it doesn't innovate in many ways.
Sengoku 3 gives us a fairly intuitive level of control over our character, it's not going to take us long to learn how to use the main characters and like any other beat'em up we're going to do the typical things that characterise this type of game as they are: Defeat enemies using a wide variety of attacks and skills, each character has different skills, status and powers, they have the ability to perform attack combos of many hits, but this will depend on our ability and we can also use weapons, even throwing weapons.
As it is common in this type of games we have a group of playable characters, and as I mentioned before, each one of them has different skills, status and powers, and just by looking at the characters we know what characteristics they have, they are:
Kagetsura: He's a ninja with great skills in the art of Ninjutsu, he has great speed and moderate strength, he's a pretty balanced character.
Kurenai: As it's common in beat'em up, female characters are always characterized by having great agility and speed, but their attacks cause less impact, and in Kurenai's case he doesn't escape from this stereotype.
Kongoh: Just by looking at it, we know that this character plays the role of the tank of the group, with great strength and resistance, but with less speed of movement.
Falcon: With this character they didn't innovate much, since in terms of skills it's very similar to Kagetsura, being in the same way a quite balanced character.
These are the 4 main characters, but we also have the possibility to get two more characters after passing the level of Italy and Japan, they are:
Okuni: This character is unlocked once we've completed the Japan phase.
Byakki: This character is unlocked once we have completed the Italy phase.
SNK will always be in the industry as one of the best video game development companies, under their label there is a great catalog of highly recommended titles that will be remembered for many years to come. Sengoku 3, despite being a pretty conventional beat'em up, is a lot of fun to play.
