Way of the Samurai 3 and 4

[Correct_Carlo]

Anyone played these? Any general thoughts on the series? Tips for a first play through? I just got "Way of the Samurai 3."

 

[Hobo Elf]

Just go nuts and experiment. You're meant to do multiple playthroughs. The first few ones will probably be the longest, but once you get better weapons and know what you are doing you'll breeze through in an hour or two and then replay again trying to go for different events to get different endings.

 

[flabbyjack]

WotS 3 was a disappoint. Sort of novel for a few new game +s, though.

 

[felipepepe]

WotS 3 is really dense and often frustrating, it takes a long time to understand everything figure out what you can do and the alternative paths. I've seen a lot of people simply play for 1-2 hours, achieve nothing, start randomly murdering people and then giving up...

WotS 4 fixes that, it's more interesting and accessible, even if the over-the-top characters won't be to everyone's liking. It's a really great game, you should consider refunding WotS 3 for 4.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I played wots4 for a bit, git stuck at a point where there was gonna be some manner of tourney. Then either I overslept or something bugged out and I couldn't progress. Had fun though, decent combat and all.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I vastly prefer WotS3 over 4. WotS4 is too dumbed down for me. The squashed weapon stats, the lack of unique weapons, the lack of bowing out or challenging an enemy during cut scenes (which made the C&C more complex). WotS3 has more obscure systems running under the hood than WotS4 did so if you want a more streamlined experience where it's harder to mess up, go with WotS4. Ultimately you should play both instead of picking one or the other.

 

[Martius]

Is it better to play any of them first or its does not matter? I will probably pick up at least one game at some sale, I just wonder which should be first.

 

[deuxhero]

Don't play on easy. Easy gives shittier swords and makes everything harder in the long run.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

It's pretty cool so far. It really gives you the sense that the world is going on around you, regardless of what you do in it. It has a sense of humor, but I confess I'm more confused than charmed by it. Some very bizarre quests (one of the first: a woman has no knife to cut vegetables. So you offer too do it for her. Cue minigame where she chucks vegetables at you and you cut them with your sword, but she also chucks giant stones at you once in a while which you have to dodge.....I guess because she's a bitch who hates kindness? And they will fucking kill you if you don't dodge them. I actually died the first time I played it. Which, I admit, was one of the more bizarre deaths I've ever experienced in an RPG.).

Totally popamole for me to admit, but the only thing that irks me is the fact that you really can't tell who is a special NPC who will give quests and who is just some random NPC. And there are tons of NPCs. Which, combined with the fact that many quests are only available at certain times, seems to make the game pretty obtuse. Plus, the only tutorials are hidden around the world in random NPCs. So if you miss them, no tutorial. I am told there are 22 endings based on different combinations of C&C, but I'm not sure how you'd ever find them all without a faq.

 

[an Administrator]

Just bought 4.

Also what's the deal with this 'self-dueling'? A clone of myself occasionally appears and fights me

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Also what's the deal with this 'self-dueling'? A clone of myself occasionally appears and fights me

It's your karma being a bitch.

 

[felipepepe]

Also what's the deal with this 'self-dueling'? A clone of myself occasionally appears and fights me

It's not a clone, it's your previous character. Stop being boring and making all of them look the same.

 

[deuxhero]

3's obtuseness is unique for the series. The others don't have the event hunt it has (I'll never know why Acquire did that) and it really makes it the worst of the series.

 

[Damned Registrations]

So I finally picked this up and am giving it a try, but it seems... broken? Balancing/difficulty wise.

I'm supposed to beat up some smith guy named dojiro but even after upgrading from a 10 damage sword to a 50 damage sword I seem to do basically the same (i.e. almost none) damage. I'd have to hit him probably 200 times to kill him, and that's not counting the swings he dodges or counters or blocks. Am I missing something here?

I progressed a bit in a quest for some evil guys, but now they want me to kill 20+ dudes that can one shot me and take like 20 swings each to kill. I pulled off a 100+ hit combo that killed like a dozen guys and still lost with no end in sight. Again, am I missing something here?

I tried doing the dojo thing a couple times but I get challenged every 10 seconds, I literally can't do anything else except defend it or my pupils all die. Which means I can't recruit more pupils.

What little browsing I've done around the internet has people talking about restarting over and over to cheese not paying the smith into getting a godly weapon. Is that really necessary? It seem insane that the weapon I spent 6k on seems about as strong as my bare hands.

 

[Latro]

yes, that's why i stepped back from this series, a lot of it is just autistically grinding your weapons

 

[Terra]

Been a long time since I played but some general points.

Do you understand the push/pull mechanics properly?

Are you trying to jump straight to one of the harder difficulties, because that's a surefire way to die quickly here. Initial playthroughs should be done on normal/easy to gain semi decent equipment & moves. From how you're describing things it sounds like you started on hard. Better equipment drops as the difficulty increases, you shouldn't be struggling too much on easy/normal.

The blacksmith (Dojima) is deliberately ridiculously tough compared to others to discourage abusing the system. If you're struggling to beat him in the cemetary (before he goes to the smithy), your equipment probably isn't up to snuff yet (I recall he has one particularly devastating move.) Same advice applies; no shame in it here; start on lower difficulty, ramp it up as your equipment and skills improve over multiple playthroughs. Story NPCs drop decent enough stuff if you follow particular plot branches, kill them and take their gear, upgrade this to tackle the harder modes, rinse and repeat.

 

[Reinhardt]

Ah, memories. Still have some screens left somewhere

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

So I finally picked this up and am giving it a try, but it seems... broken? Balancing/difficulty wise.

I'm supposed to beat up some smith guy named dojiro but even after upgrading from a 10 damage sword to a 50 damage sword I seem to do basically the same (i.e. almost none) damage. I'd have to hit him probably 200 times to kill him, and that's not counting the swings he dodges or counters or blocks. Am I missing something here?

I progressed a bit in a quest for some evil guys, but now they want me to kill 20+ dudes that can one shot me and take like 20 swings each to kill. I pulled off a 100+ hit combo that killed like a dozen guys and still lost with no end in sight. Again, am I missing something here?

I tried doing the dojo thing a couple times but I get challenged every 10 seconds, I literally can't do anything else except defend it or my pupils all die. Which means I can't recruit more pupils.

What little browsing I've done around the internet has people talking about restarting over and over to cheese not paying the smith into getting a godly weapon. Is that really necessary? It seem insane that the weapon I spent 6k on seems about as strong as my bare hands.

Short answer:

Yes, you'll have to do runs that are basically just for creating a new quality sword, and 6K is basically nothing in terms of cash spent. Also, suck it up and use Easy difficulty until you get a better sword and style. This is something you just have to get with this series: The difficulty levels are balanced to ALL THE SHIT you can get, not what you start with, you stick with Easy until your stuff feels strong enough for Normal, and repeat.

(Also as a side note, I don't *think* difficulty level affects quality of sword part drops in WotS4, like it does in WotS3)

(Also also as a side note, I can't quite remember if it still worked in WotS4 like it did in WotS3, but you can kill the smith to get your money back and then bugger off to nearest ending; the basic smith in WotS4 has a martial arts style you can nick from his if you fight him, and you should get it because True Ending *really* wants you to have a strong custom martial art style if you go for it)

 

[mogwaimon]

IIRC difficulty does still affect the quality of sword parts in 4, it's been a long time since I played it and 4 is admittedly my least favorite of the series....For the record my series favorite list is 1>3=2>4. This may mark me as a loon to most fans of the series, but I docked 2 some personal points because my buddy who got me into the series would constantly play it every time I went to his house and get me involved in his sword hunts...I'm still a little sour on repeating the lengthy and unskippable opening scene countless times while trying to get the Kushinada or whatever super long sword it was on hard and dying each time. Either we didn't know how to game the save system or we never quite understood it....anyways...

I rank everything higher than 4 because 4 had the near mandatory

Spoiler

'you die on day 5 if you didn't do the right thing' ending

and making custom swords the main focus as well as implementing the new sword styles system sort of devalued the replayability of the game since you no longer have swordhunting as a big motivator because movesets are no longer tied to swords and the custom system made for bland swords, in my opinion. Yea, the character knowing moves and being able to use any sword with any moveset is more realistic, but in practice that gamey element was actually for the better. Characters were also pretty bland, too, compared to earlier entries...well, except for the bondage sisters but they don't really 'do' anything as far as I remember.

3 was a pain in the ass with event hunting and also had bad characters but at least you were never railroaded into a bad end. I know 1 had bad ends too, but you can pretty much live the three days in the town out without triggering a bad end, whereas in 4 when that happens the trigger for it is right smack dab in the center of town so it's basically unavoidable. That and 3 still had a big focus on sword hunting with rare swords appearing on high difficulties again despite having a rudimentary custom sword system; which was done better in 3 because swords still had movesets tied to them but, IIRC, you could then use those moves on the custom swords once you learn them from the collected sword so you still needed to go get good ones to get good moves.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well I put some more hours in and finished my first run. I started on Normal and it was grindy as fuck to kill the stronger guys but I guess I had other options so I can't fault it too hard on that. I ended up just killing Dojima because I no longer cared about smithing swords by the time I was strong enough to beat him anyways. He dropped an ok sword and a new style. Won the tourney and became a demonscale apparently, with the minister guy as my sworn enemy I tried killing him a couple times but he was apparently immune to life loss and he just vanished instantly when I took out all his vitality. Liiiitle bit weird he invited me to see his torture room after I massacred his entourage. Sword smithing and styles are both pretty boring to me, the smithing because all that really matters is throwing more money at a sword for a bigger number, and the styles because like all action games, having one really good move is way better than having dozens of good moves. I mastered a few styles, but the only ones that stood out were some ninja bullshit one with a leg grapple that does a fuckton of damage and can't be blocked, and one that has a 70 damage swing that can fire about 10 times a second during musou mode. Never found another spear style and the only unarmed style I found was when I accidentally killed the smith and reset anyways.

Story seems to have way more complexity than I initially thought, but I somehow avoided basically all of it? I was doing some missions but I guess they don't count for shit, fighting the entourage wasn't recognized, and some other random encounters also didn't show up as events. I'll do another run and side withone of the obvious main factions this time, should be a cakewalk with the weapon and style I have now.

Game is also janky as fuck. Even the music cuts out randomly quite often and I had it try to blow out my speakers during a transition at one point. One of my styles I can't seem to master because it requires killing someone with the kick while you've fallen down but it never seems to register after the first time I did it with a different style. Lots of weirdness with people randomly running away from fights and such as well. was trying to get the lowest rank for a while but never got below 4% even after I started stealing meals and murdering bodyguards. Tourney bumped me back up to like 8% for the end.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

There's only a five or so Spear styles, IIRC, so yea you won't really find them all that often. There's very few Spear styles, even fewer rifle and revolver styles (IIRC there's literally a single Revolver style and two Rifle styles which are even harder to find). Vast majority of Styles are for different single sword stances. The thing is that Spears don't have different stances, same with Martial Arts, so there's only like a single sword stances worth of them.

Also, the thing with Styles is that you basically pokemans them, and then once you have enough mastered you use the Dojo to create a custom style (and that basically does boil down to having a few top-tier moves and a lot of Style modifiers). Every Style move and modifier that you've mastered, you can then re-use for a custom style.

(Personally one of the things I like the most about WotS4 is that after 3 it was a relief that your moves weren't built-in to the SPECIFIC SWORD you were using but instead separated into a style you could swap)

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I know I'm in weeabooland but are there any non katana swords in 3 and 4?
In 3 I got that giant meat cleaver off the head dude of the red army but that's it.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I got some giant cleaver thing off a dude late in my run and Ms. Megamelons has like, fucking excalibur or something. I barely saw any of the game so there's probably several more.

 

[mogwaimon]

in 4 if you go to the English consulate you can get broadswords from pretty much any of the soldiers walking around. In 3, though...well, yea, you got that giant cleaver from the bandit leader, he also drops a rare cleaver on hard mode and up...I think that might be it, really. Non-katana swords are very rare in this series. Sometimes you can get an axe or Dojima's hammer or something, and now that I think of it there may be one or two rapiers/sabres on some of the story NPCs like the army soldiers at the end of 1 and the girl in the red dress in either 2 or 3, but those are few and far between.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Started playing this series earlier this week, beginning with the first game on PS2. Played through it quickly a couple times and had a fairly enjoyable time. It showed me the basics of what the series had to offer.

I went ahead and bought 3 after, in order to dig into a larger, more modern iteration of the games. It took me essentially an entire poorly executed run at 5 hours to feel like I was starting to scratch the surface of what the game had to offer, and have been feeling very hooked ever since. The game is just so unique in its approach, and building up resources and actual game experience through subsequent runs is very addictive. I bought 4 right after everything clicked for me and am very happy I have many more hours of this type of game play ahead of me between 2, 3, and 4.

If anyone has 3 or 4, tried them, then dropped them shortly in, I would urge you to keep trying. There are some beautifully unique games to find underneath their seemingly opaque surfaces. Really impressed with what I've found in them. Oh, and always start your first samurai on easy, then move on to normal after. It's not shameful, it's the way it's meant to be played.