Samurai Shodown Anthology

Two fighters stand a screen apart, neither moving, because in this series the first person to press a button usually loses. That patience is the thread running through all six games collected here, from the blocky 1993 original to Samurai Shodown V Special, and it is what separates SNK's weapon fighters from everything else on the Neo Geo. Damage is enormous. A clean heavy slash can remove a third of a life bar, and the rage meter that fills as you take punishment turns a losing round into a live grenade.

The compilation runs the mainline 2D entries in order: the first four Neo Geo games plus V and V Special. Watching them in sequence is the real value. The original is stiff and mean, with animation that reads more like a set of poses than a fight, yet its sense of distance still works. Samurai Shodown II is the one most players will settle into, and rightly so — the additions of dodging and the deflect turned a good game into one of the finest 2D fighters of its decade. III sharpens everything into something brutally unforgiving, IV smooths the edges, and V Special, developed years later by Yuki Enterprise, is a fast, technically dense reworking that ends rounds with a single decisive cut.

As a package it is plain. Menus, a gallery, no online play, no rollback, no training modes worth the name in most of the entries. SNK Playmore's port work is competent rather than loving, and on a standard-definition set the sprites hold up better than they have any right to, though the PS2 controller's d-pad is a poor partner for games built around precise negative edge and disarm timing. A stick changes the whole thing.

There is also the matter of V Special's finishers, the grisly overkill animations that were stripped from the Neo Geo home release and restored in some versions of this collection. It is a small thing, but it says what the series always was: theatrical, bloody, and uninterested in being fair. Samurai Shodown never balanced itself around long combos or safe pressure. It balanced itself around the fear of getting hit once.

For a PS2 owner, this remains the most efficient way to hold the whole 2D arc of one of fighting games' great oddities. Play them back to back and you can watch a studio spend a decade refining a single idea: two people, two blades, and the terrible cost of being impatient.