Item - Sword of the Samurai

This book is disappointing and is one of the worst Fighting Fantasy gamebooks in my opinion. The plot failed to hook me from the start, and the writing is not particularly interesting.

Furthermore, the amount of sudden death endings is just stupid. There is one area where there is like an 80% chance of dying! Therefore, you will end up starting over several times, and since the plot is fairly linear, it will not be very interesting.

Towards the end, the battles are also very hard, and you will need a lot of Honour Points (unique value for this book). I couldn't really find enough ways to add Honour Points, so I constantly failed later in the book too.

In short, harder books like this CAN be good since they are challenging, but only if the plot is interesting and the book is very non-linear... try Creature of Havoc instead!

More reviews by Braxus

Overall, this is a pretty interesting book which presents an interesting environment, and an intriguing set of special skills the player can make use of. My favorite part was a sequence where the player is required to travel to a variety of different worlds and enlist allies for a tournament with a group of demonic monsters. At times I felt shaken by it, though, like when the book asks if you know the secret of using the magic sword's power, and it's a simple "do you/don't you" question. There was a part elsewhere in the book where the player needs to use a letter-number translation scheme to solve a couple puzzles, and it was odd to me to use that for some minor obstacles and not to unlock something that would give them a big advantage in the final battle. Other than the occasional slip, this is a fun book and I enjoy going back to it once in a while.

More reviews by Fireguard