Ruining It For Everyone Else Since 2004
Unleashing my inner samurai

Unleashing my inner samurai

The Steam Winter Sale brought forth lots of fun investments and gifts, I decided to venture into one that was gifted to me recently called Samurai Warriors 4-II. It looks promising, the art style is really beautiful and the dialogue is in Japanese, so you’ll want to use subtitles unless you’ve mastered the language. The characters themselves look pretty awesome! You even have the option of making your own to play outside of story mode:

It was bound to happen.

The gameplay looked like a lot of fun from what I’ve seen in videos. That was until I had a look at the control scheme:

Bit of a problem here… The mouse is non-existent in this game, as in it doesn’t even exist as a cursor. Pretty shitty considering other hack n slashes give you a keyboard and mouse option. Seriously, who thought these controls were a good idea? For example if you want to rotate the camera around you have to press buttons… I tried plugging in a controller, not my Steam Controller but one of my Logitechs, since this game is a port from Playstation I figured I’d try something close to its native control, but even that felt awkward. And the camera wouldn’t move with the right analog stick, fucking really? When that didn’t work I looked into Steam Controller configs. Some of them came pretty close to working out ok, but I think I’ll have to make my own from scratch.

This is a Japanese game, but for the love of Bob look at some other Japanese ports to PC for inspiration. The Devil May Cry games (excluding 3 because that was a shitty port) and Metal Gear Rising did a good job porting the game to work with both a controller or a keyboard and mouse setup. There really is no excuse for this.

I’m hoping the Steam Controller can fix this game up good with a special config. I really want to like this game, it’s pleasing to all the other senses, but play-ability thwarts appearances. The game has such positive reviews, so I’m hoping there is some sort of workaround.