Hey, Does Anyone Remember Red Steel?

The early era of the Nintendo Wii was a fun – but incredibly strange – time for gaming. With the console bringing motion controls to the table in a way no other system had at the time, developers were still very much working out the kinks with the hardware. Thus, while Nintendo’s first-party titles remained high-quality games, third-party developers were delivering games that most certainly had their warts. It’s definitely not difficult to find a long list of shovelware from third-party developers simply looking to make a quick buck off of this newly popular console.

One noteworthy title that launched for the Wii was Red Steel, a first-person shooter/swordfighter mix that was rather hyped for presenting something very different on the new console. It certainly tried to be something greater than a lot of the aforementioned shovelware, and it was the hope that a game like this would drive some of the “hardcore gaming” audience back to the Wii, as such gamers previously abandoned Nintendo consoles with the rise of the PlayStation. As it was, though, Red Steel was…rough, to say the least. But strangely enough, this game very well could’ve been a touch ahead of its time.

I’m Excited To Play As The “Black Samurai” In Assassin’s Creed Shadows

I’m excited to see how Ubisoft develops Yasuke’s story, ‘controversy’ be damned.

Red Steel Had Its Warts

As an early showcase of what the Wii Remote’s motion controls could do, Red Steel was incredibly wonky and unresponsive, and the blend of shooting and sword fighting never felt too comfortable. The motion controls simply didn’t have the 1:1 precision that would make a game like this successful, and while Wii games have proven to be successful with first-person controls, Red Steel was not one of them. The shooting was occasionally novel, but the swordplay often glitches out, and it feels so slow and bulky that it feels closer to whacking someone with a club.

As a matter of fact, much of Red Steel just feels shockingly slow. Turning and moving your character feels incredibly clunky, and the enemies you face don’t exactly move with much urgency. Their AI is also not precisely smart, and given the generous auto-aiming within the game, it’s kind of easy to just shoot along without needing to think too much about precision. Sure, the controls are unique, especially in how the game makes you move your Wii Remote toward the screen to help aim down sights, but on the whole, good luck getting the game to work.

Oh, and good luck getting through the game without being driven insane by the awkward polish. For a genre that’s often very reliant on having a smooth, stable, and fast frame rate, Red Steel often chugs along and performs pretty poorly. It’s already tough to sell anyone on a shooter that plays at 30 frames per second, but it’s even harder to sell someone on a shooter that barely reaches 30 frames per second. Combine this with the numerous bugs and glitches, and you have a game that was always bound to live down to its potential.

While it sold reasonably well for a Wii game on account of the early hype, it quickly faded into obscurity. Publisher Ubisoft would come back with a sequel four years later in the form of Red Steel 2, though it is about as “in name only” as a sequel could possibly get. Nevertheless, it was a wholesale improvement over the first game, utilizing the Wii Motion Plus accessory to work around the finicky controls of the first game to make a much more satisfying experience. Sadly, it sold far worse than the first game, and while there was talk of a third game coming out, it never came to be.

Samurai Games Can Learn From Ghost of Tsushima’s Kurosawa Mode

Games shouldn’t be afraid to pay tribute to masters of cinema.

Was It Still Ahead Of Its Time?

While it had plenty of issues, Red Steel is a fascinating little game, in that it still feels somewhat ahead of its time. The game, whose story centers around a Yakuza, came to America around roughly the same time that the Like a Dragon franchise was kicking off here. That franchise has since gone on to become incredibly popular, and while that’s not necessarily thanks to Red Steel, it’s interesting to see how Red Steel predated that franchise and tried to push such storylines into a slightly more “mainstream” game while Sega and Ryu Ga Gotaku Studio were putting together their games.

Red Steel’s mixture of first-person shooting and swordplay also feels like an interesting precursor to a number of similar titles that have emerged in the 18 years since. While they may not have taken their cues from Red Steel, modern games such as Shadow Warrior and even Cyberpunk 2077 have come along that combined first-person shooting with first-person swordplay and have seen great success. It can also be said that games like Ghostrunner have since come along that took the first-person sword-based gameplay of Red Steel and refined it in a much greater way.

Red Steel also feels interesting in that its samurai-based gameplay, especially that of Red Steel 2, is an interesting precursor to a lot of the current-day gaming climate. Sure, it wasn’t the first samurai game of its kind, but in the years since, we have seen a massive rise in the number of samurai games, including Nioh, Ghost of Tsushima, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Rise of the Rōnin, just to name a few. You could easily make the argument that Red Steel, while not directly paving the way for these games, attempted to push the samurai genre and style of game long before today’s wave of samurai-based adventures.

Of course, Red Steel still had too many flaws to call it a truly “great” game (and as previously mentioned, those flaws would obviously bleed into the sales of its sequel), but it’s an interesting oddity of a game. It’s a strange example of a title that belongs in the conversation alongside notorious gaming disappointments, while also surprisingly existing as a game that may have been ahead of its time. It also feels like the kind of game that could see some success if it made a return today, given that the market has become more receptive to games like it. Ubisoft could even bring it back as a virtual reality game, as a bit of a nod to its motion-controlled past. It’s probably a long shot, but perhaps this curious little game deserves another chance to dance.