As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy.
- There are some horrible deaths as early in the series as the first two installments; when a fierce slash as the final hit of the last round may cut the opponent in half or slit their throat covering the winner in a fountain of blood. And behind the winner making his/her pose, the corpse of the loser is leaving the stage by the Kurokos on a stretcher while wrapped in a crude straw coffin or even leaving only their weapon behind on the ground. The part about the stretcher? This often even occurs if you don’t trigger a death animation.
- The fourth game would add victims puking blood from blunt attacks, as well as the series’s first ever true fatalities.
- Samurai Shodown V Special's Overkills/Zetsumei Ougis
, which are often accompanied with an equally sinister sound of slow drum beats. Some of the most brutal ones are as follows:- Rasetsumaru: Rips the opponent's heart out with his bare hands, then crushes it before their very eyes and begins drinking the flowing blood as they collapse.
- Kusaregedo: Drags his opponent off-screen and then eats them alive while you hear screaming. Then he comes back onto the screen and vomits up their skull. If his opponent was Mina, he spits out her bra and panties instead after devouring her.
- Enja: Grabs the opponent in a stranglehold and engulfs himself and the opponent in a pillar of flames, incinerating them alive while a silhouette of his full demon form can be seen.
- Jubei: Splits his opponent vertically and horizontally.
- Suija: Throws the opponent onto the ground, then manipulates the water within their body in order to telekinetically lift them above his head. Then you see him close his hand into a fist, and hear the opponent's death scream in addition to a Sickening "Crunch!". He then leans back, and the opponent's blood begins to rain down upon him as he basks in ecstasy.
- Hanzo: Breaks the foe's arms, then their legs, then leaps into the air (shattering their ribcage as they ascend) and piledrives them headfirst into the ground so hard that their skull cracks, killing them due to fractured pieces of bone impaling their brain.
- Kyoshiro: Slashes the opponent as Kuroko the judge watches, then summons a flame which blows off the opponent's head and right arm.
- Basara: Drags the opponent into a bottomless pit, where we hear the victim's screams as Basara viciously mutilates them until only their disembodied head remains, which is tossed out of the portal as it closes.
- Yunfei: Tears out his opponent's soul, then cuts it in half, killing them.
- Zankuro: Braces himself with by planting himself firmly on the ground, charges up energy as if he were performing his super, but instead creates a full-screen Sword Beam that completely obliterates the opponent clean into ashes, leaving only their feet.
- The character's reactions are Nightmare Fuel, too (and sometimes, a Tear Jerker).
- Shizumaru, a demon-possessed boy who fights with a Parasol of Pain, only wanted to knock out a foe but the demon inside him splits the foe in two instead, reducing the poor boy to tears and apologies).
- Mina, the archer girl, throws down her bow and arrows in horror and turns away after obliterating her opponent with explosives.
- Nakoruru, the cute girl with the hawk pet and the female protagonist, hesitates for several seconds before realizing she has no choice but to finish the opponent.
- Rimururu, Nakoruru's younger sister, freezes her foes, then crushes them with a icy hammer. That foe should have shattered to a million pieces, but Rimururu simply smiles at the screen, unaware of what she's just done.
- Some of the Seppukus are bad as well. Kyoshiro is eaten by his own frog; Basara slashes his own throat, rather graphically; Rimururu freezes herself alive; Enja and Suija both rot into bones...
- The old SNK site had an entry on how to make a Gandara, the mid-boss of Samurai Shodown 64. It gives a new meaning to Powered by a Forsaken Child. The process involves, among many things, roasting 1205 men alive, polishing their bones with the tongues of infants, submerging the organs of 4003 men in bug eggs and letting them decompose, and filling a bucket with amniotic fluid, the blood of nine virgins, and thousands of severed scrotums and vulvas.
- Kusaregedo is terrifying in concept alone. In life he was forced to succumb to cannibalism in order to survive the Great Tenmei Famine, but as punishment he returned from the dead as a gaki, or "hungry ghost", cursed with an insatiable desire to eat everyone and everything in sight, but he especially craves children. In his ending, he devours his own daughter. His main weapon is the bone of his right arm; it's not clear if he merely summoned it out of his arm or if he ate his own arm and gnawed the bone sharp, but given his victory pose where he starts eating himself, the latter is more likely. The developers said themselves they wanted to make a character uglier than both Earthquake and Gen-An. They succeeded.
- Basara is a yurei, a ghost brought back from the dead due to an intense grudge. In his case, he wants revenge against Zankuro, who mercilessly slaughtered him, his entire village, and his lover Kagaribi. Nothing remains of the man he once was except for his love for Kagaribi and an intense, seething hatred for Zankuro. Commanded by Kagaribi's spirit to simply "hunt", Basara is now a batshit insane serial killer who harvests the souls of his victims in order to appease Kagaribi, desperately hoping to be with her once more. His weapon is a gigantic Fuuma Shuriken on a chain that shreds his opponent's flesh like a buzzsaw while he laughs like a maniac. It goes without saying that he has some of the most disturbing super moves and Fatalities in the entire series. Even his win pose is creepy: the spirit of Kagaribi appears in his arms, but his joyful moment doesn't last as her body rots before his eyes into a skeleton and then crumbles into dust, at which point he lets out a horrible, tearful shriek.
- A few endings in VI count:
- Amakusa successfully manages to cause The End of the World as We Know It.
- Enja performs a Fusion Dance with Suija and proceeds to go on a world-destroying rampage.
- Kusaregedo essentially devours everyone, and eventually becomes an urban legend.
- Mizuki sacrifices Sieger, Kyoshiro, Haohmaru, Jubei and Nakoruru in order to Take Over the World.
- Rasetsumaru essentially goes on a killing spree to the point that he becomes known as a demon.
- Decapitations in Samurai Shodown Sen are of particular note, as the victims' headless bodies will spasm and convulse in death while lying on the ground.
- The fact that children are engaging in death matches in itself can be very nightmare-inducing. Nakoruru was only 15 when she first debuted, and Suzu, a protagonist of Samurai Showdown Sen, is 14-years-old. These same children within the series are subject to the same horrifying fatalities and brutal death listed above.
- In 5 Special, defeating Nakoruru or Rimururu with certain Fatalities will result in a special KO cry from both of them: a bloodcurdling, agonized scream.
- Death animations return in the 2019 game, and they are particularly unnerving to watch in the new 3D engine. Characters will either spray blood all over the winner as they crumple to the ground, or will be sliced in half horizontally. In both cases, they eerily fade away into nothingness. There's also the new version of the Issen, which is presented in a Single-Stroke Battle style camera shot, and killing the opponent with it results in them slumping over in pain and dying in a pool of their own blood.
- Shizuka Gozen is a possessed spirit who is fought in a very surreal dimension that looks like you're fighting inside of a tapestry. Architecture seemingly manifests from out of nowhere, and the scenery, although beautiful, is very unnatural, looking very clearly drawn in watercolor. It gets even worse in Round 2, where things suddenly turn much darker and more chaotic. Shizuka herself, when she loses the mask, is shown with black eyes and yellow pupils and as she taps on her drum you can see her skin become transparent, revealing her skeleton.
- Shizumaru of all characters becomes this in the 2019 game thanks to his new Super Special Move. As it turns out, the plot point about him being called a "demon" does have some weight to it. He savagely throws his umbrella at the opponent, and the camera pans to reveal he now has Black Eyes of Crazy and a Sickly Green Glow before charging the opponent in a berserk frenzy.
- His ending isn't any better. It involves him having a literal nightmare after the battle with Shizuka Gozen, depicting a demonic shadow with glowing green eyes, swinging a gigantic silver blade around. As the shadow finishes its swordplay, its gaze immediately turns to Shizumaru, and the poor kid is paralyzed with fear as it slowly and menacingly begins to approach him. He wakes up in a cold sweat when the shadow is at point-blank range. And yes, the description of the shadow is very similar to that of one Zankuro Minazuki, who is heavily implied to be Shizumaru's biological father.
- The more you think about Iroha's Super Special Move, the more disturbing it gets, even though most of it happens in silhouette behind a shoji screen (a reference to the Japanese folktale she's inspired by). Not only is Iroha capable of performing a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown with her bare hands and feet (and while being completely naked to boot), she also briefly turns into her crane form to perform a literal crane kick; she finishes off the assault with an upwards slash of her swords, which results in a giant blood spatter in the 2019 game.Iroha: Please don't look, no matter what...
- With the addition of Hibiki, you'd probably be wondering which version of her they decided to go with for this game, considering her last outing went with her Psychopath ending version. Well, guess what: you get to decide that all over again just like in her home game. And when you fulfill the conditions to drive her nuts, you get to see the results in full 3D and even more voice acting than before, and they are terrifying. Psycho Hibiki sports a Psychotic Smirk at all times and speaks in a Creepy Monotone, showing almost no emotion and calling her opponents weak when she kills them. Her interactions with Jubei and Shizuka also change, showing that she is absolutely ecstatic at the prospect of killing them. Even her ending has her giving an evil expression while being framed over a black background, unlike her normal ending.
- Amakusa's story in 2019 shows exactly how he becomes the Big Bad of the first game. He is revived as a vengeful spirit like Basara, and takes Shizuka's fragment of Ambrosia in his ending. Afterwards, he sets up his base of operations at his castle in Shimabara, luring in Hanzo's son Shinzo and then possessing him. It ends on a terrifying Call-Back to his introductory cutscenes. As the narration goes into the plot of the first game, Amakusa appears in the same pose as his introductory cutscene from that game, but with the Nightmare Face of Aku Amakusa from IV, sporting a Psychotic Smirk with glowing red eyes.
