Digital Eclipse's Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection pairs the previously unreleased Samurai Shodown 5 Perfect with the six preceding games in the series, universal online play, and comprehensive historical documentation. Developer interviews, design documents, unused character concepts, and more make the Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection a compelling purchase for series diehards or arcade fans with a casual interest in the franchise, but a lack of training modes means it's a poor resource for newcomers looking to actually get good.

Originally released in arcades throughout the 90s and early 2000s, the Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection's selected titles are weapons-based fighting games. Most attacks do higher damage than the genre's typical punches and kicks, so winning a match comes down to opponent reads and smart decisions about when to attack, rather than complex combo execution. This, along with original developer SNK's usual four-button fighting system, makes Samurai Shodown games more intuitive for newcomers than combo-focused, six-button fighters.

Related: Samurai Shodown (2019) Switch Review: A Shogun Street Fighter

That doesn't mean there isn't plenty of depth to master, though. Samurai Shodown games can be quite challenging against both human and AI opponents, and the brief, pre-game tutorials do little to explain special moves, disarming attacks, onscreen gauges, and other intricacies. This makes NEOGEO Collection's omission of training modes a huge letdown, especially when previous Samurai Shodown re-releases have included them. Character move lists, accessible in-game via the pause menu, at least give players an idea of what to do, but their usefulness is limited without a place to practice techniques.

Samurai Shodown 5 NeoGeo Collection Gameplay Borders

The collection also features a confusing variance in difficulty settings for each game. The three versions of Samurai Shodown 5 allow players to select difficulty level, rounds required to win versus another player, round length, and rounds required to win versus a CPU, but all the other games only feature the generic difficulty level setting. This may be due to technical limitations, since these three were the only post-2000 SamSho releases, but it's sad to see the game that was already most accessible (via an online-enabled, training mode-equipped PS4 and PS Vita Special port from 2017) remain so.

Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection's missing features can't hurt the fighting game series' excellent gameplay, however, which is still top-notch. The collection's emulation is great, with no noticeable slowdown or glitches. If players are able get the hang of any title, they'll likely be hooked on the extremely satisfying sound design and visual effects, atmospheric music, inventive character designs, and beautiful pixel art. Unfortunately, Screen Rant was unable to verify if that same experience carries over to the online play.

Every game in the collection features online multiplayer with rollback netcode, but many players reported issues with the service following the collection's PC release in June. Digital Eclipse subsequently released several patches addressing these problems prior to the console versions' launch, but Screen Rant was unable to find an online match across several games and settings in the Nintendo Switch version, including after 20 minutes of waiting for a Samurai Shodown 5 Special ranked match on a late Sunday evening. A "Challenge Friend" mode allows for direct matches with a sparring partner, but a lack of online lobbies means it's not possible for groups of players to set up quick, successive battles.

All of this is to say Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection is not the ideal way to experience any one Samurai Shodown game - especially not for new players hoping to become competitive. What it has, instead, are spades of history. The first-ever release of Samurai Shodown 5 Perfect, which features light story exposition between arcade matches, is historically significant on its own, but the real treasure lies in the collection's Museum mode.

Samurai Shodown 5 Perfect NeoGeo Collection Gameplay Borders

The Museum's "History" section provides a decades-spanning timeline, with official story details and behind-the-scenes trivia for each of the seven main titles, as well as high-res art for every Samurai Shodown character appearance in an SNK or third-party crossover game. "Characters" includes background info, character art, and concept art of 38 fighters. "Interviews" contains well-produced video interviews with Samurai Shodown developers, ranging from just under seven minutes to almost 30. "Music" allows playback of the original NEOGEO MVS soundtracks, "Pro Match Videos" contains short clips of professional fighting game matches with written context and commentary, and "Behind the Scenes" rounds out the collection with a rich and comprehensive stock of (untranslated) design documents, unused character concepts, and more.

For longtime fans or nostalgia-seeking, lapsed players, Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection is a great way to experience well-emulated versions of the franchise's first six games, a never-before-released end to the NEOGEO MVS' arcade library, and a horde of in-depth development information - all wrapped in a sleek package. But anyone looking to dig deep into a particular Samurai Shodown game should look elsewhere: NEOGEO Collection works far better as a digital SamSho museum than a platform for play.

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Samurai Shodown NEOGEO Collection is available on the Epic Games Store, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam, and Xbox One. A Nintendo Switch code was provided to Screen Rant for the purposes of this review.