 1st Samurai was one of those games that was freaking everywhere when I was growing up. Go to Mr. Movies or Video Update to rent a game, there's 1st Samurai. Open up a gaming magazine, there's an ad for 1st Samurai. Looking for cheap used games to buy at Funko Land, there's 8 or 9 copies of 1st Samurai. It was one of those omnipresent Super Nintendo games up there with Shaq Fu and brutal paws of fury. Yet neither I or any of my friends growing up ever played this one, and I'm not sure why. It turns out 1st Samurai is a perfectly okay action platformer, not great, not terrible, but perfectly decent. It compares pretty closely to something like Musya, or sorry, Musha for all the pedantic types out there. It has similarly styled settings, and a lot of oddball enemy designs straight out of feudal Japan. The big difference though is your character's abilities and range of motion, he's actually somewhat quick, and a sword attack is pretty satisfying to use. There's also secondary weapons you can pick up like axes, daggers, and flying stars. There's checkpoints you can warp back to. And there's these weird bell things, which I'll get to later. You can flip between these three categories at the bottom of the screen with the L and R buttons, and use the A button to activate. One thing to keep in mind here, the enemy respawn rate is insane, and the levels here are long and split up into two parts, with the boss fight at the end of each. So this is the kind of game, just like Musha, where you take a lot of damage. In this case, not because your character is too slow, but because there's tons of stuff coming at you from all directions. You have five lives and no continues, but you do have a reasonably lengthy health bar, though. Plus, if you lose all your health, you lose only your sword at first. The game gives you a chance to get it back by defeating enemies with your fists, and that's a cool little feature. That brings me to the weirdest part of the game, the sound design. They got a little carried away with the sampling here, because there's some bizarre and annoying sound effects. Your character shouting, my sword is great at first. But some of the other stuff, like this hallelujah when you find food. Yeah, that gets old quickly, and definitely does not fit the rest of the game. It's especially annoying when you get to the second level, and there's no music at all, so you're just stuck with these irritating samples. Ugh. Also, the difficulty structure here in this game is a little wonky, and that may turn some people away. Ideally, you'd like a game to get tougher as you progress, but it seemed to me in this one. The difficulty just spiked randomly here and there. There are some parts that are really tough to get past. I will say the art direction throughout the entire game is pretty interesting, and there's some seriously crazy looking enemies that pop up. But unfortunately, the level design and layout is hit or miss. There are instances where everything is too cluttered together, and it feels like there's not enough room to attack or dodge all the stuff coming at you. On the plus side, the game cleverly implements these bells you collect. Use them and they'll clear a path for you, like summoning a rainstorm to put out a fire, or simply creating more platforms to cross this waterfall. So if you hit a point in the level where you don't know what to do next, look for a bell and use it at the place you're stuck. In addition to all that, each level also has you collect five of these red flower-looking things. You gotta find all five to summon the boss to move on with the next part of the game. I should also mention the story in this one. You're some dude learning to be not just any samurai, but the very first samurai. I'm not sure what that makes you a master, but whatever. Anyway, the Demon King shows up and promptly kills your master, but before he can get after you, the Wizard Maid shows up to chase the Demon King off into the future, so you gotta learn how to travel through time to get him. Yup, it's the 90s, alright. First Samurai was actually originally developed for the Amiga before making its way to the Atari ST, DOS, Commodore 64, and finally Super Nintendo, where the port was handled by Chemco, the same company behind titles like Phalanx and Dragonview. The Amiga received a sequel titled Get This, Second Samurai. That one eventually made its way to the Sega Mega Drive. Anyway, I gotta say First Samurai is a bit of a surprise. This game can be kind of annoying, the cluttered levels can be a bit much, and the sound design really gets on your nerves after a while, but overall I had a good time playing this one. I said earlier it reminds me of Musha, but I'd definitely rather play First Samurai over that one. Don't get me wrong, it's not gonna touch some of the better SNES action platformers out there, but I'd put it along stuff like claymates, or cool spots, or even games like Joe and Mac, or PLOCK. This is a pretty good playthrough, and I liked it more than I thought I would.