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As this channel has developed, one of the
things I’ve become most interested in investigating
is the ways in which other media can be adapted
into video game form. You know, beyond just
writing another story as part of a franchise
and sticking it haphazardly on top of a bog-standard
action game template, is there a way that
you can actually design a game from the ground
up such that you can capture the character
of that series through play?
I’ve done videos on this very idea with
Neon Genesis Evangelion, John Wick, Fast and
Furious, and I have plans for many other franchises
and while it’s not as cut and dry as you
might think—just because you convey the
themes and ideas of a film or TV show through
mechanics doesn’t guarantee a good game—it’s
often incredibly interesting to see a developer
go deeper and at least attempt to connect
to the more abstract heart of the franchise
they’re working with.
And it was this mindset that got me pretty
excited to dive into Samurai Jack: Battle
Through Time, an adaptation of what remains
one of the most genuinely unique (and one
of my personal favourite) animated shows of
all time. It was also this mindset that led
to the perhaps inevitable disappointment setting
in as credits rolled, following seven hours
or so of playing a truly unremarkable hack-and-slasher.
It’s weird because I can’t really say
Battle Through Time is bad, I didn’t dislike
my time with it necessarily—seeing these
characters I’ve essentially grown up with
rendered with such care (with a great deal
of the show’s cast returning for vocal duties),
set off a fairly significant nostalgic pang
that I really did not see coming when I booted
up this wee game I’d seen basically nothing
about in the run-up to its release. That said,
as evidenced by the utterly wild move to include
the intro to the show in all its 4:3 glory,
only to cut away right before the theme tune
kicks in, there’s something that feels very…
off about Battle Through Time for me.
For one, mechanically, it’s downright archaic.
While it follows the convention of X light
attack, Y heavy, it has that kind of cartoonishly
floaty feel that brought to mind some of the
less complicated brawlers of the PS2 era.
It boasts a frankly outrageous wealth of customisation
options with different weapons, each with
their own movesets and multiple upgrade paths
governed by several collectable currencies…
none of which lines up with just how simplistic
this game really is; with the seemingly constant
need to repair weapons and a subtle lack of
responsiveness in its controls meaning that
button mashing with the starter sword often
produced more effective, visually impressive
results than the more careful combos the game
was pushing in my face.
And like I say, that’s not a wholly bad
thing per se; there is a weird feeling of
nostalgia, of having to unlearn the habits
and expectations modern hack-and-slashers
have taught me, to go back to a style of game
that I used to play a lot growing up. It’s
just a shame that this nostalgia doesn’t
extend much further than that—I can’t
help but feel, as someone who grew up with
the show, that Battle Through Time fails to
live up to its legacy. Or, to put it another
way, Battle Through Time might look like a
Samurai Jack game but… I don’t think it
is one.
Let me explain—when I think of Samurai Jack
as a franchise, I’m not picturing some vast
arsenal of weapons at our hero’s disposal
and effortlessly, repetitively hacking through
hundreds and hundreds of identical enemies
through dozens of samey corridors as you do
in Battle Through Time. Instead, when I think
of the show, the image that pops into my head
is of a bridge—specifically, the one in
the episode Jack and the Scotsman. Before
we meet said Scotsman, we’re treated to
minutes of Jack… crossing said bridge. It’s
slow, it’s quiet, it’s bleak—we’re
unsure of what brought him here or what lies
on the other side; we’ve just grown accustomed
to his single-minded determination in accomplishing
his simple goal: behind Jack is the future
he’s trapped in, ahead is the potential
to escape it.
And when we come across the Scotsman, Jack
has to desperately fight the urge to give
into his baser instincts as again, we see
minutes of insults being thrown his way in
an attempt to rile him up; leading to a fight
scene that shows the futility of combat above
all else, all comedically set against the
same sparse backdrop we’ve seen the entire
episode up to this point; culminating in a
dazzling fight that forces the pair off the
bridge, that’s all the more intense, meaningful
and funny all at the same time, for its slow
build-up, and its singular focus on the dynamic
between two opposing personalities.
In other words, yes, of course, the show does
contain plenty of intense fights across its
five seasons, but it’s the many, many episodes
like this that give me confidence in saying
that Samurai Jack is not defined by its action—rather,
its action is defined by the character and
the world he inhabits.
Even in the more action-heavy final season,
it really felt like every sword swing meant
something; every blow Jack sustained was visceral.
This was no longer simply a story about a
samurai out of time, trying to get home; this
was a man desperately searching for some reason
to keep fighting, to survive in a world he
had long since aged out of; a world whose
apocalyptic state Jack fully blamed himself
for. And indeed, the action scenes, while
consistently spectacular in their animation,
were often as impressive for how they illustrated
the psychological toll this whole ordeal was
taking on Jack as much as the physical impact.
It wasn’t fun to see our character like
this; rather, it was often exhausting—but
all the more compelling for it (at least in
the first half, anyway; I’m still annoyed
at how the final batch of episodes hurriedly
saw Jack put his mental anguish to one side
in favour of a half-baked love interest and
rushing to place a neat little bow on everything,
but that’s beside the point for now).
Look, what I’m saying with all of this is
that, while it might be easy to look at a
cartoon samurai and immediately think “hack
and slash” as the ideal framework for an
interactive adaptation… that’s not really
what the show is, to me at least. Whenever
Jack got his sword out, it was an event, mainly
because so much of the surrounding episode
was often silent visual storytelling. There
was a measured focus to the worldbuilding
across the show in a way similar to how Jack’s
patience and deft hand would usually win out
against his more brutish foes.
Now, compared to all of this, Battle Through
Time feels like Kiddies’ First Beat-Em-Up—using
the potentially neat premise of Jack once
again being thrown into the future by Aku
as an excuse to revisit some old moments from
the show; only to turn even the real emotionally
wrought scenes into yet another meaningless
brawl. Its cold open right at the show’s
conclusion expects you to come into this with
a full knowledge and investment in this show,
that the game fails to pay off on a level
other than the completely surface nostalgia
I mentioned earlier.
In the show Jack rarely wanted to fight, yet
in the game, almost every mechanical input
revolves around that floaty, repetitive, visually
dull combat in some way or other. And thanks
to this limited mechanical scope, combined
with a short runtime, the more iconic enemies
featured here—the ones that, in the show,
required Jack to utilise clever thought and
cunning—simply don’t get the chance to
shine like they once did; their roles reduced
to just another target to mash on until their
health bar goes down, just like you did everything
else in this glorified whack-a-mole.
The terror of Jack being relentlessly chased
down by the daughters of Aku, his will being
utterly ground down until he is stripped,
both literally and figuratively, of everything—including
his honourable insistence that he would never
kill anyone—here, is just another battle
where you dodge, then hit, then dodge, then
hit; tiringly confident in your ability to
make it through this cartoonish slashfest
untouched in a way, in the show, Jack never
was—the mechanics of the game simply don’t
line up with the heart of the franchise.
I do think there are ways in which a hack-and-slash
core could be altered to better fit a Samurai
Jack game. Perhaps a greater focus on exploration,
more rewarding or meaningful than “head
down this alternate path to find a useless
trinket or combat trial” would help bring
life to the environments that were so key
to Jack’s journey. Or hell, as seemingly
ubiquitous as the format is these days, shifting
the game’s combat mechanics slightly to
more line up with a Dark Souls or Sekiro-type
weightiness and snappiness, lending more urgency
to each sword swing, would at least line up
with the more frantic, desperate action of
the final season.
Ultimately, the fact we got something as shallow
as we did instead, might just come down to
the idea that actually gameifying the quietude
of a series like Samurai Jack, while a facinating
concept in the right hands, might just be
too daunting a concept for a lot of developers,
working with an established and beloved IP,
to take on. Get it wrong and you might end
up with a repeat of the Evangelion game on
N64; literally translating every scene from
the show into either horrendously clunky fight
sequences or quicktime event-driven nonsense
that only succeeds in making your thumb hurt.
But, as daunting as it might seem to please
that fanbase, there’s a reason said fanbase
gravitated towards Jack in the first place—it
was precisely because this show was different.
As much as it might seem like a bit of a sneering
attitude all these years later, as a young
kid sitting in front of a TV, witnessing the
restraint of Samurai Jack relative to other
animated shows of the time, made it feel like
I was watching something altogether more sophisticated,
more quote-unquote “adult” than its contemporaries.
That subtlety, that confidence in knowing
how long to hold a shot or a scenario to draw
out the most tension or comedy or tragedy…
that was what drew me to the series.
In this sense, Battle Through Time is actually
fairly consistent with the second half of
season 5; seemingly so desperate to give fans
what they wanted on a surface level, that
they rushed towards an ending whose lingering
darkness was far outweighed by the need to
resolve everything in a neat little bow. Perhaps
in the eyes of the team creating the show,
fans had been waiting for years for this return;
they couldn’t just leave things on an ambiguous
note—of course, fans wanted closure; they
wanted Jack to complete his quest. At least,
that’s what I thought I wanted.
Except, as season 5 went on, I became more
excited to see the show dive ever deeper into
this character with its trademark finesse,
regardless of where it ultimately ended up.
I wouldn’t have minded closing things off
on a more ambiguous, perhaps more sinister
note if it meant things could come to that
close more naturally—just like I wouldn’t
have minded a more ambitious attempt to represent
this kind of gut-wrenching tension, this real
deep exploration of this character, this world,
through action in a video game; even if it
meant that the resulting gameplay wasn’t
as immediately engaging or combat-heavy as
allowing you to simply, meaninglessly hack
your way through fodder enemies for a prolonged
period of time.
And if it feels like I’ve spent more time
talking about the show than the game at this
point, I guess that’s telling because, compared
to the show, there really isn’t that much
to say about Battle Through Time. It’s fine,
it’s OK; the people behind it clearly love
the show just like so many others (and it’s
not like you’re paying full price for it
either—you could do worse in terms of simple
hack and slashers). But, examining the game
in the context of what made that show the
classic of western animation that it is, it’s
hard to deny that I feel like I’m still
waiting for a true Samurai Jack game.
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on Samurai Jack!
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