Posted: Feb 6, 2014 Attacking player fights through a series of opponents that the defending player has prepared ahead of time.

Bushido Blade was an interesting game, not just for the more realistic and threatening combat model. The game took place in a large, open castle environment that the players were free to run around in, creating their own set piece battles. The game never did anything with that (I think to get one ending, you just run through the castle without fighting), but I always thought it was a cool idea, that you could have a fighting game in an open world.

The premise for this entry is that you have a fighting game between two players, each playing many different characters, as one player (the attacker) tries to make it through the castle of the other (the defender), to defeat his final form.

At the beginning of each game, both players select six different combatants each that they will use. They can only use one character at a time, but the conditions under which those characters meet and fight are different. For now, just assume that the characters are akin to other fighting games, with their own special moves and style.

Fig 193.1 - xxx.

At the beginning of the game, the defending player places his six combatants in various zones of his castle. They begin inactive and do not appear until the defender takes control of them. There is a final throne room, where the combatant placed there represents the final boss.

The attacking player starts outside the castle, and his goal is to make it through the castle to the throne room and defeat whatever enemy is there. The defender can take control of any of his combatants on the map, trying to defeat the attacker, or at least slow him down. Once the defender has taken control of an combatant, he can not leave that combatant unless he is defeated. Once defeated, he can chose a different combatant from the remaining list.

When the attacker's combatant is defeated, the attacker picks his next combatant and respawns in a zone that he has previously "conquered" (he has been to the zone personally, and there are no enemy combatants stationed in the zone). The attacking player loses when he runs out of combatants to respawn as, while the defender loses if his throne room is ever "conquered".

The general gameplay involves the defender trying to guess which path the attacker is taking and defending it with his current combatant. However, if he defeats the attacker, the attacker will respawn somewhere else, possibly taking a different route towards the throne room. Since the defender can not see where the attacker is, he needs to make educated guesses and then run his combatant over to where he thinks the new attacker will go. This gives the attacker a huge advantage.

To give the defender a slightly better chance of defending his throne room, each of his combatants have special abilities that they perform when inactive:

- Poison Trap - Attacker who enters this zone is poisoned and slows down for a short period of time.

- Alarm Trap - Tells the defender that the enemy player has entered the room.

- Battle Trap - When the attacker enters the room, he is swarmed by a group of enemies that he must defeat to leave the room.

- Cage Trap - The attacker is locked in the room until he either dies (suicides?) or the enemy player arrives.

- Duel Trap - The defending combatant is activated and controlled by an AI, pretending to be the other player.

- Teleport Trap - Attacker is teleported to a previous room.

- Darkness Trap - The room becomes pitch black.

Each trap can be triggered only once per attacker, so if guy A springs the teleport trap, he cannot be teleported again (though guy B can be). These traps are only available while the associated defender is inactive. Once the defending player takes control of that combatant, the trap is nullified.

The attacker does have special abilities of his own, depending on the combatant used. For instance, one combatant glows in the dark (darkness doesn't matter), another is immune to poison (isn't slowed at all), one sneaks past alarms, while another could be impervious to teleports. None of the traps are completely deadly, but they do slow down the attacker in various ways. The attacker can learn (or guess) the trap locations and use his pool of combatants intelligently to get past them quickly.