Samurai Jack - The Shadow of Aku

The cartoon Samurai Jack was built on quiet: long stretches without dialogue, wide empty frames, a man with a sword walking through someone else's nightmare. Making a game out of that is a strange job, because games hate silence. The Shadow of Aku answers by borrowing the look and the premise, then filling the gaps with combat, which is the reasonable choice and also the limiting one.

The game is a third-person action title built around Jack's katana. You chain light and heavy strikes, block, and work through waves of Aku's minions across levels drawn from the show's mix of feudal Japan, sci-fi cityscapes and deserts. The visual treatment is the best thing about it. Cel-shaded characters, flat color fields and a deliberate graphic sense carry the series' style better than most licensed games of the period managed with their source material. Screenshots flatter it, and in motion it still looks like the cartoon.

The play underneath is plainer. Combat is serviceable, with enough variety in attacks to avoid pure button-mashing, but enemies repeat often and encounters lean on the same rhythm. There are platforming stretches and environmental obstacles to break things up, and they show the usual tie-in problem: ideas that are sound on paper but not tuned with much care. Camera and hit detection can get awkward when several enemies crowd in.

That was the licensed-game economy of the early 2000s in miniature. A recognizable property, a short development window, and a team trying to hit a tone the budget could only partly support. What separates this one from the pile is that the people involved clearly understood what made the show look the way it did, and they protected that.

Today it is best approached as a curiosity for fans of the series rather than a lost classic. The fighting will not surprise anyone who has played better action games from the same hardware. But there is something satisfying about seeing Jack's stark, angular world rendered in real time, and for a while the style does more work than the mechanics ever could.