Description
Playthrough with Earthquake. Oh look, it’s THIS game again, joy. It’s on every variant of the Neo Geo Mini because of course it is. Lots of people love this game. I don’t.
This is the Japanese version, but you can change the language to English in the options menu. Although this game’s English translation is terrible, but at least in a funny way. Playing it in USA mode also means every character has a bad cold, as you’ll see they sneeze when they get hit instead of bleeding.
This chances of doing a one credit clear of this game are very, very low. After playing through it so many times (about 30 attempts) I am certain this game’s AI has some kind of randomness to how aggressive it is, but more on that later. If you’ve never played Samurai Shodown II before, the CPU is some of the absolute worst SNK has ever had you face. It input reads, blocks everything, counters everything, gets massive damage buffs and will always throw you in situations it shouldn’t be able to. The boss is beyond horrible too.
There is one strategy with one character that gives you a better chance at clearing the game. You pick Earthquake, and you use his crouching heavy slash move for the entire game. That’s it. This strat has been around for a while, I personally first read about it on an achievement guide for the Xbox 360 version. It can be a three hit move if you do it at close range, but for whatever reason the CPU won’t block it… most of the time. Unfortunately this strategy isn’t the easy win you want it to be, some characters will jump if you try it at the wrong time. The game’s flawed control scheme also makes things harder, you’ve got to push the A and B buttons together on the same frame to use it and this can be difficult. I have never liked the controls for the first two games in this series, they did at least change them for future games.
Earthquake does have some other moves but the only other ones to use are his throws and his fire breath. If you’ve got a full POW meter the fire breath can do a lot of chip damage, so try and get your opponent in the corner with a throw then get them with the fire breath as they get up. A good example of this can be seen at 13:29. His weapon breaking move is also useful because it can do a lot of chip damage, and the CPU usually just stands there blocking it. So if they’ve got little health left just use it to finish them off.
When I mentioned the CPU randomness, I’m talking about what certain characters to against the crouching heavy slash. When I was trying to beat this game, there were times where Charlotte would be the stage 3 opponent and she’d constantly jump over the attack when I tried it. Yet here, where Charlotte was the 10th opponent, she practically got hit by it all the time. I don’t know what the deal is but it seems certain opponent orders are easier than others.
And just to make things more difficult, I got to fight Kuroko in this playthrough. I have no idea why he showed up, my understanding is if you beat the 2nd, 4th of 6th opponent with your weapon breaking move and less than 20 seconds on the timer he’ll show up, but here he appeared after the 3rd opponent was beaten. I’ve read he can just randomly show up sometimes which seems to be what happened here, thankfully he’s easy to beat with Earthquake.
This game has an unusually long credits sequence for a Neo Geo game. Given that probably less than 2% of players ever saw it in an arcade maybe that was why.