Description
Playthrough with Zankuro. Samurai Spirits Zero Special was released in 2004 and was the final Neo Geo game. It removes a few characters from the previous game but adds Amakusa, Zankuro and Mizuki, the bosses of other Samurai Shodown games.
I know this game is very popular with fans but, you guessed it, I don’t care for it, like any other game in this series. One problem I had right away was with the controls, you have to press A and B together again to do your character’s heavy slash attack. I think it would have been better if the kicks had been taken out entirely, and had the weapon attacks on the A, B and C buttons. The D button now lets you do things like roll and lie down, but I think that was a change for the worse -what was wrong with just double tapping down to lie down like in SSII?
SNK did at least make the CPU in this game a little easier than it is in previous games. A lot of the opponents will just get hit by your attacks, wow! You don’t even need a special strategy most of the time! There are a few exceptions (I had to figure out a strat to deal with Enja on the fly) but overall it’s not that bad I guess.
But then you get the bosses. To see the credits for this game you have to defeat Amakusa, Zankuro and Gaoh with overkill moves. Failing to beat any of these bosses with an overkill move results in the game ending immediately, which to me is a stupid requirement. You’ve only got one chance to land your overkill, if they block it you’re done. Thankfully the bosses do tend to let themselves get hit by overkill attacks most of the time.
The only one I was struggling with was Gaoh. The reason I was jumping around so much was to make him use that move where he spins the spear over his head, if you can dodge that it gives you the perfect chance to get him with Zankuro’s overkill before he recovers. Mizuki is the final boss, she’s a joke compared to her SSII incarnation yet still annoying to fight. Don’t let her trap you in the corner and try pinning her down with Zankuro’s projectile wave. I didn’t think she would get hit by the overkill but she did, not that you need to defeat her with it to get the credits.
The AES version of this game censors certain moves. In particular, the arcade version has Zankuro’s overkill reduce his opponent to mostly dust, but here they survive. There was a big controversary at the time of the game’s AES release due to the overkills being censored, among other problems. I’ll admit I was disappointed because nothing would please me more than to have a savestate and watching Mizuki getting reduced to dust over and over, but oh well.