Uploaded November 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Playthrough with Amakusa. Samurai Shodown IV was released in 1996, and was the first game in the series not to have redrawn sprites for everyone. All of the playable characters from the previous game return, and there are five extra characters. Charlotte, Jubei and Tam Tam were added, along with brand new characters Sogetsu and Kanzuki. The story takes place after Samurai Shodown III, but before Samurai Shodown II.
Air blocking is gone, and you can’t manually charge up the POW gauge any more. Items are no longer thrown onto the screen during a fight. New additions include C&D combos. By pressing the C and D buttons together when close to the opponent, your character will start a combo. You then have to press more buttons in a certain order to continue the combo. Fatalities were also added -if you finish the opponent in a certain way, an input will appear on screen. If you enter this input, your character will do a finishing move.
The USA AES version is censored, meaning white blood instead of red and the heavier violence is gone. This means that you can't split your opponent in two at the end of a fight (although strangely, Zankuro stills kills Amakusa in this manner). Fatalities were disabled, and worse yet, the honorable deaths were also disabled. Hororable deaths were a new feature where you could get your character to commit suicide during a fight. The trade off with this is that at the start of the next round, you'd have a full POW gauge.
Thankfully this game does have a blood code, which restores everything to normal, from the blood color to the honorable deaths. At the main menu, highlight options and hold down the start button, then press A. Keep the start button held and highlight exit, then press the A, B, C and D buttons together. It’s surprising to me that SNK were still bothering with blood censorship at this point -this game was released several months after the first Resident Evil -but at least there’s a code this time, unlike with the previous game.
Rage gauge explosion allows you to destroy your own rage gauge by pressing the A, B and C buttons together. Doing this then allows you to use a powerful attack by pressing the B, C and D buttons together, but the catch is you only get once chance at using it. If it hits you’ll do loads of damage, if it misses you won’t be able to give it another try.
As for the game itself, from a single player experience, it's almost as horrible as the last three. SNK did at least make the first two opponents really easy, but the difficulty ramps up from stage 3 and onwards. The CPU tends to block way too much and input reads all the time.
SNK for whatever reason thought it was a good idea to lock the endings away behind a time limit. And there are some other bonuses you can only see by beating the game quickly. When you start a game, you will see a time limit, you need to reach Amakusa’s castle within this time limit. This is difficult because of how hard the CPU is. But there is another issue that I don’t think is documented that well: the credits. When I was practicing this with other characters, I could often get to the castle in time, but then the credits wouldn’t play when I beat the game. I think those are time dependant but I’m not really sure. I do know the bonus cutscene at 21:38 only shows if you beat the entire game, including all bosses, within the time limit.
This game has two bosses. To reach them, you have to get to Amakusa's castle within the time limit, failing to do this will have you fight your rival only instead, and this gets you the bad ending. The first boss is Amakusa. Remember in the first game how annoying his teleport spam was? Well guess what’s back for this game! The next boss is Zankuro. Not much to say about him other than he blocks a lot and his moves do ridiculous damage. If you beat him, you then have to fight your rival, who in Amakusa’s case is Hanzo.
This game's credits have a couple of things of note in them. First off, "ANTA-BAKA?". Given this and some of Yuri's speech in KoF '96, someone at SNK was clearly a Neon Genesis Evangelion fan. But the more infamous credit is a little after this: "LLAOYLLAKCUF" Try reading that backwards. It seems that someone working on this game wasn't happy, although given that they'd done one Samurai Shodown game per year four years straight probably didn't help.
The English translation for Samurai Shodown IV was definitely rushed, as the opening intro was left untranslated, as was the bad ending. And how did "VICTOLY" end up in the game?! Some of the cutscene dialogue is also funny at times, although not to the levels seen in the second game.
Playthrough with Amakusa. Samurai Shodown IV was released in 1996, and was the first game in the series not to have redrawn sprites for everyone. All of the playable characters from the previous game return, and there are five extra characters. Charlotte, Jubei and Tam Tam were added, along with brand new characters Sogetsu and Kanzuki. The story takes place after Samurai Shodown III, but before Samurai Shodown II.
Air blocking is gone, and you can’t manually charge up the POW gauge any more. Items are no longer thrown onto the screen during a fight. New additions include C&D combos. By pressing the C and D buttons together when close to the opponent, your character will start a combo. You then have to press more buttons in a certain order to continue the combo. Fatalities were also added -if you finish the opponent in a certain way, an input will appear on screen. If you enter this input, your character will do a finishing move.
The USA AES version is censored, meaning white blood instead of red and the heavier violence is gone. This means that you can't split your opponent in two at the end of a fight (although strangely, Zankuro stills kills Amakusa in this manner). Fatalities were disabled, and worse yet, the honorable deaths were also disabled. Hororable deaths were a new feature where you could get your character to commit suicide during a fight. The trade off with this is that at the start of the next round, you'd have a full POW gauge.
Thankfully this game does have a blood code, which restores everything to normal, from the blood color to the honorable deaths. At the main menu, highlight options and hold down the start button, then press A. Keep the start button held and highlight exit, then press the A, B, C and D buttons together. It’s surprising to me that SNK were still bothering with blood censorship at this point -this game was released several months after the first Resident Evil -but at least there’s a code this time, unlike with the previous game.
Rage gauge explosion allows you to destroy your own rage gauge by pressing the A, B and C buttons together. Doing this then allows you to use a powerful attack by pressing the B, C and D buttons together, but the catch is you only get once chance at using it. If it hits you’ll do loads of damage, if it misses you won’t be able to give it another try.
As for the game itself, from a single player experience, it's almost as horrible as the last three. SNK did at least make the first two opponents really easy, but the difficulty ramps up from stage 3 and onwards. The CPU tends to block way too much and input reads all the time.
SNK for whatever reason thought it was a good idea to lock the endings away behind a time limit. And there are some other bonuses you can only see by beating the game quickly. When you start a game, you will see a time limit, you need to reach Amakusa’s castle within this time limit. This is difficult because of how hard the CPU is. But there is another issue that I don’t think is documented that well: the credits. When I was practicing this with other characters, I could often get to the castle in time, but then the credits wouldn’t play when I beat the game. I think those are time dependant but I’m not really sure. I do know the bonus cutscene at 21:38 only shows if you beat the entire game, including all bosses, within the time limit.
This game has two bosses. To reach them, you have to get to Amakusa's castle within the time limit, failing to do this will have you fight your rival only instead, and this gets you the bad ending. The first boss is Amakusa. Remember in the first game how annoying his teleport spam was? Well guess what’s back for this game! The next boss is Zankuro. Not much to say about him other than he blocks a lot and his moves do ridiculous damage. If you beat him, you then have to fight your rival, who in Amakusa’s case is Hanzo.
This game's credits have a couple of things of note in them. First off, "ANTA-BAKA?". Given this and some of Yuri's speech in KoF '96, someone at SNK was clearly a Neon Genesis Evangelion fan. But the more infamous credit is a little after this: "LLAOYLLAKCUF" Try reading that backwards. It seems that someone working on this game wasn't happy, although given that they'd done one Samurai Shodown game per year four years straight probably didn't help.
The English translation for Samurai Shodown IV was definitely rushed, as the opening intro was left untranslated, as was the bad ending. And how did "VICTOLY" end up in the game?! Some of the cutscene dialogue is also funny at times, although not to the levels seen in the second game.
