The Stack

I mentioned that you control a team of seven charcters in this game. Presumably this number was chosen by a Kurosawa fan. They’re not the same seven samurai as in the movie, though. The character classes in Throne of Darkness are:

The Leader
The Brick
The Archer
The Swordsman
The Wizard
The Ninja
The Berserker

(A ninja isn’t really a kind of samurai, of course, any more than a stoolie is a kind of policeman. Actually, if you read the character bios in the manual, a lot of them turn out to have been raised as farmers and the like, rather than as members of a hereditary military aristocracy. But why bother complaining about historical implausibility in a game with tengus and oni in it?)

In contrast, the character classes in The Seven Samurai are:

The Leader
The Leader’s Assistant
The Leader’s Buddy
The Stone-Cold Killing Machine
The Kid
The Loose Cannon
The Other One

(Like the Ninja, the one I’m calling “The Loose Cannon” isn’t really a samurai. So there’s some kind of balance there.)

This list may not be quite as gameworthy as the first one, but I have a long-standing fantasy about about the ideal game adaptation of The Seven Samurai. The player, as I see it, would choose which samurai to play, and that choice would fundamentally shape what kind of game it is. Playing the Loose Cannon, for example, would make the game more freeform and self-directed, like GTA: you could do your assigned missions, but you could also just wander off by yourself and try to steal the enemy’s guns. If you chose the Killing Machine, it would mainly be an action game. The Leader would be about strategy, the Leader’s Assistant would be about micromanagement. The Kid? Dating sim.