Trivia / Samurai Shodown

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: Tam Tam and Cham Cham. As mentioned under Ambiguously Brown on the main work page, the two siblings were originally said to be from South America but borrowed cultural aspects from across the Americas and even Africa and Australia. The Samurai Shodown (2019) game retcons them to be specifically Mayan, and also changed Cham Cham's pelt from being a tiger's to a spotted cat's. Being Mayan coincidentally solves some other issues, as wearing jaguar skins, teeth, and claws was often done by the ruling class or by great warriors and hunters. Cham Cham and Tam Tam also bear some vague resemblance to the Maya Hero Twins, with Cham Cham easily lining up with Xbalanque, who was physically cat-like, and turning their siblings into monkeys being similar to Tam Tam's fate in Samurai Shodown II. Even Cham Cham's boomerang isn't impossible to believe now, as some civilizations in the North American Southwest actually used them for hunting, and that isn't too far from Central America for her to have believably found one. Cham Cham's skin is also a bit darker now (more so in the artwork). Overall, while still fantastic Mayincatec characters, the retcons in Samurai Shodown (2019) make them less generically "tribal".
• Acting for Two: Harumi Ikoma is Charlotte, Nakoruru, Rera and used to be Mizuki. And you'd probably have to be told to know.
• Casting Gag:
  • In the reboot, newcomer Yashamaru is voiced by Kōhei Amasaki, better known as the voice of Haruo Yaguchi from Hi Score Girl, a series that is very much involved with Samurai Shodown both in and out of universe.
  • Also in the same reboot, it's not the first time we hear Yui Ishikawa (Mina Majikina) voicing a girl with white hair and with a blindfold, though she is wearing an eyepatch instead here.
  • Again, also in the same reboot, however, in a different way, Warden's rival battle is against Jubei. While he doesn't voice Jubei Yagyu, Masaki Terasoma actually voices a different Jubei instead.
  • This is not the first time that Amakusa's voice actor in the reboot, Shusaku Shirakawa, has voiced a bishonen possessed by an evil entity who was on the receiving end of unjust treatment.
• Completely Different Title: Samurai Shodown II, III and IV were given different titles for the Korean market, likely due to laws at the time regarding references to Japanese culture in games.
  • II became Saulabi Spirits
  • III became Fighters Swords
  • IV became Pae Wang Jeon Seol: Legend of a Warrior
• Creator Backlash: On Twitter, when mention of the pachinko games were brought up, an SNK official community manager replied "We don't talk about those anymore".
• Distanced from Current Events: The global bowdlerization of Samurai Shodown V Special for the home releases was apparently spurred in part by the Sasebo Slashing.
• Dueling Works: Between the 2019 installment and Granblue Fantasy Versus. Both games return to a slower-paced style of fighting, drastically different from the fast-paced "airdasher" games that have surged in popularity since the late 2000s. Came to a head when the demo for the 2019 game and the beta for Granblue launched on the same day in May 2019.
• Executive Meddling: SNK's community manager admitted during one of his streams that it was him who convinced producer Oda to include Iroha in 2019 by showing him all the interest from fans all over the world for her return.
• Follow the Leader:
  • According to the series' original planner and director Yasushi Adachi, Samurai Shodown was inspired by other early 90s fighting games like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat (1992). The Mortal Kombat influence should come as no surprise, since Samurai was one of the first Japanese fighting games to feature in-game blood and gorey finishing moves.
  • Samurai Shodown Sen attempted to follow the footsteps of combo/weapon-based fighting game like the Soul Series. Unfortunately for SNK, that ended up being a temporary Franchise Killer.
  • The 2019 reboot takes a number of cues from Street Fighter IV, right down to the 2.5D gameplay, the heavy ink lines on the character models, and the watercolor-inspired art style. Unlike Sen, this one is fortunately much better received because what they followed was the graphical presentation; the gameplay remains the same (with more bonus stuff included) as the classic series.
• Franchise Killer:
  • Samurai Shodown Sen, best described as a highly stripped down clone of Soulcalibur; stripping the series from what made it unique in the first place: The 'one hit can take away a lot of health'. And in addition to that, the fantastical and mystical special moves that made the game flashy in the first place were severely toned down for the sake of 'realism'. For those reasons, this really bombed big time. It put SNK off from touching the franchise for 8 years until they decided to try again in 2018, which worked.
  • Overall opinion of Warriors Rage (PS) is even less favorable.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Samurai Shodown V Perfect was an unreleased update of Samurai Shodown V Special that was only available from a single arcade location test in Japan, whose only proof of existence were off-screen photos. It was pulled off from arcades and never resurfaced, until Samurai Shodown NeoGeo Collection finally included it in 2020.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": For those who never bothered with mobile games, let alone an exclusively Chinese one, this would be their first exposure of Gongsun Li.^note You won't find Gongsun Li in Arena of Valor either, since she's ported into a different entity: Eland'orr. SNK is using the original version from Honor of Kings.
• No Export for You: Prior to the Samurai Shodown Anthology and digital re-release on PlayStation 4, Samurai Shodown VI was only released on Japanese arcades and PlayStation 2, with the latter adding more playable characters and spirit systems available.
• Port Overdosed:
  • The original Samurai Shodown is one of the more recent games to qualify, due to SNK's near-constant stream of compilations and re-releases over the last decade.
  • Samurai Shodown V Special might be the most egregious example, with three different ports to the PlayStation 4 - the actual release, the ACA Neo Geo release, and as a part of the upcoming Samurai Shodown Neo Geo Collection. This is especially interesting when you remember that for years, the game was notorious for lacking an accessible home port.
• Portmanteau Series Nickname: Rather uniquely, this trope is mostly applied to the localized name, as fans in the West affectionately refer to the series as "SamSho."
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Nobuhiro Watsuki, creator of popular anime and manga such as Rurouni Kenshin, Buso Renkin and Gun Blaze West, mentioned early in Rurouni Kenshin that he is hooked on the Samurai Shodown series and bought a Neo Geo CD just to play it. He continued to write Samurai Shodown-related notes in subsequent releases of Rurouni Kenshin manga. In 2003, SNK hired him to design new characters for Samurai Shodown V.
  • Subverted by Yasuhiro Nightow, Japanese mangaka and game creator who created the anime and manga Trigun. In his previous time as doujinshi artist he created a Samurai Shodown-based manga book, yet later reflected that he isn't very proud of his work for that book and requested that there be no further reprints. Ironically, the book's notoriety is what caused SNK to notice his love for the series and later lead to his job for designing Youkai Kusaregedo in Samurai Shodown V.
  • Ukyo's current voice actor, Shinjiro Sakurai, not only used to play the game in arcades, but he actually used to play Ukyo himself in those games.
• Role Reprise:
  • Daiki Nakamura returns to voice Haohmaru in the 2019 game after playing him in the 64 games and Capcom vs. SNK 2.
  • Mai Nakahara returns as Nakoruru in the 2019 game from voicing her in King of Fighters XIV.
  • Atsushi "Monster" Maezuka returns as Kyoshiro in the 2019 game, having voiced him since II.
  • Kong Kuwata has the record of always keeping the role of Genjuro from his debut to every of his appearances.
  • Masaki Terasoma reprises his role of the Warden from the Japanese dub of For Honor.
  • Mayumi Asano reprises her role of Baiken from Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-.
• Translation Correction: Wan Fu was noted as being 83 years old in the first game, though this was a translation error — the English section of the official site has a typo stating his year of birth as 1705, while in reality the 89th year of the Chinese Qing Dynasty (which started in 1644) is 1732, which means he's actually 56 years old. This has since been corrected.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As revealed in a 2017 interview, the first Samurai Shodown was originally designed as a monster-themed Beat 'em Up. Gen-an was the only thing carried over from this version of the game.
  • A 2nd revision of V Special, codenamed Final Edition, was developed and actually completed by Yuki Enterprise. It featured balance changes, bug fixes, and new single-player content. SNK, however, knew absolutely nothing about this and were already planning the release of VI on Atomiswave hardware rather than Neo Geo due to declining sales. Its location test didn't last for even a single day before it was pulled by SNK themselves. As a result, it was long thought to be a myth...until the release of the Neo Geo Collection, that is. After over 15 years, this lost game will finally see the light of day, now called Samurai Shodown V Perfect (Samurai Spirits Zero Special Kanzenban in Japanese, lit. Samurai Spirits 0 Special Final Edition), complete with a full, brand-new English translation. The whole story of how Perfect came to be and how it was finally able to be revealed in an official capacity can be read here. After its release on the Neo Geo Collection, Perfect would later see an official arcade release, 18 years after the release of Special.
  • Sugoroku was originally supposed to be a pirate character, explaining the otherwise out of place pirate stage in Tenka. This was scrapped due to the fact that all of the preproduction designs strongly resembled Cervantes, and the design team couldn't think of something more creative before deadlines.
  • According to game developer Nobuyuki Koruki, Darli Dagger's design started life as a feudal Japanese firefighter character (a Hikeshi) but the team couldn’t get the concept to work. Then the concept of a burly male carpenter was pitched before they finally decided on merging this design with a that of a "powerful, strong-willed female with African roots."
  • Additionally Nicotine was planned for the 2019 installment, and even had a model developed early on. However, Oda stepped in and declared that the roster was lacking in female characters, so Shiki was chosen instead.
  • According to the official art-book accompanying the 2019 game, both Darli and Earthquake were supposed to be assigned with their own stages — hers being a lush, tropical beach on Madagascar depicting her ship-building yard, and his a treasure-filled thieves den in a ruined house in Texas — though these never made the cut at launch.
  • Although Tam Tam does not appear in Samurai Shodown II, he may have been planned early on according to some code within the game.

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