YMMV / Bushido Blade

• Anticlimax Boss:
  • Bushido Blade 2's Shainto campaign has a final stage against the last surviving Kagami... a girl that just sits there, wishing not to fight and to be killed for her ancestors' misdeeds. One slash and it's over, though there's also the choice to spare her. Though the route has a proper final boss in the previous stage who puts up much more of a fight.
  • The boss that the Narukagami clan face tries to put up a fight, but one blow to his armored front stuns him, and one more blow to his unprotected back kills him. The end.
• Catharsis Factor: It's insanely hard to unlock them, but it's possible to play as the gun-wielding Katze and Tsubame. Going full Indy-style on your opponents after having the superiority of their traditional weaponry shoved in your face for the whole game takes a long time to get old.
• Narm: The second game springing for an English dub resulted in most of the cast sounding like they're treating life-or-death combat with no context to the scenes they were voicing, even in spite of having several actors that are now known as legendary voices in the anime industry. Almost all seriousness flies out the window when someone like Tatsumi sounds more bored and tired rather than wrought with grief at unwittingly killing his own father and brother.
• Spiritual Successor: The Kengo series of games for the PS2. Only the first game made it to the States and Europe, whereas the second one skipped the States. The third game wasn't exported to either region, while the fourth and final game was exported to Europe.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The only way to get the best ending in the first game is to beat every enemy without being injured or killed even once. And you must defeat every enemy honorably to even avoid the bad ending (meaning don't attack while the opponent is talking, don't kill them from behind, don’t throw sand in their face, etc etc). There is a way to skip fighting most of the normal characters, but it involves running through many different sets of scenery for a few minutes, injuring the opponent's leg, and then jumping down a hole. This is arguably the one area the sequel improved on.
  • The "honor" system can seem slightly ridiculous and unfair when one enemy literally brings a gun to a sword fight and will shoot you dead almost immediately after his opening speech from 6 feet away. Apparently his decision to use a firearm against you is completely honorable. Attacking him before he points the gun right at your head? ''Dishonorable.''
• That One Boss:
  • Katze. He has a gun and is extremely agile, you have a sword and clunky running controls. However, he only has six shots. If he doesn't kill you with them, he's a sitting duck while he reloads. Moreover, injuring his left arm prevents him from reloading and disabling his legs will cause him to surrender almost instantly.
  • Tsubame suffers the same problem, except she packs a rifle that is obnoxiously good at blocking your attacks and carries more shots than Katze. About the only way to attack her is from behind or when she tries shooting — and her rifle is far more lethal than Katze's handgun, necessitating running out her ammo as well unless you get a lucky angled slash in from the side.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The second game reduced the number of stances and moves, removed the honor system in fights, had horrible dubbing (though it does offer some gems like the main trio of Cowboy Bebop dub: Steve Blum, Wendee Lee, and Beau Billingslea), and nerfed the wounding system (making it so you can never be truly crippled, you can just be slower). The fanbase was not pleased.

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