By pleasing coincidence (since I'd originally planned to cover something else entirely, but logistical issues -- namely, that the gamebook series I meant to write about turned out to have a set of reprints by a different publisher a few years later that fixed several of the problems found in the original versions, and it's going to take a while for me to track everything I need down -- mean we're getting this instead), Sword of the Samurai is both the twentieth entry in the original Fighting Fantasy series, and the twentieth entry in our ongoing series examining mistakes in adventure gamebooks. So what's the problem?
It may not come as a huge shock to learn that SotS has a Japanese flavour, casting the player character as a samurai tasked with quelling a rebellion against the Shogun, although it is still set in the world of Titan. To this end, there is a unique statistic for this book, HONOUR. You begin the book with 3 HONOUR points, and certain actions will increase your score, whilst others will dock HONOUR points. (I trust I don't have to explain what sort of actions increase and decrease your HONOUR.) Whilst you need to have a sufficiently high HONOUR score to be able to take certain options in the adventure, if your HONOUR ever drops to 0, you should immediately turn to section 99:
You are completely without Honour. As you cast your mind back over your actions since you began your quest for Singing Death, you realise that you acted dishonourably at almost every turn. Without Honour you are nothing, your life is worthless. There is only one honourable action left to you. You must commit seppuku, take your own life. You summon up the courage necessary to fall upon your katana, and drive yourself forward onto the blade until you die. At least in this last detail, the manner of your parting from the world, you have acted according to the code of the Samurai.
The instructions are very clear about this: should your HONOUR fall to 0, you should turn to 99 immediately, irrespective of what you are doing at the time. This creates a couple of situations which a real nit-picker might find fault with: in section 221 you can run out of HONOUR in the middle of the pitch-black night, and in 289 you lose an HONOUR point midway through combat, but there is a bigger problem. Several sections (28, 64, 120, 218, 244, 248, 268, 306, 374, 376) all involve you being arrested, and having your swords confiscated... and you receive an HONOUR penalty specifically for the shame of having all your weapons removed. You can put this down to an example of Gameplay and Story Segregation if you like, but it's still an annoying little inconsistency (especially since if you get into a fight before recovering your weapons, you automatically die due to having nothing to defend yourself with).
One minor curiosity that seems worth noting is that to win, you need to not only find the legendary Dai-Katana known as Singing Death, you also need to find out its secret. Despite the fact that the book uses numerical codes for other puzzles throughout the book (where you convert the answer to a number with a code that goes A = 1, B = 2 and so on up to Z = 26, add up all the numbers and turn to that section), it doesn't do so for the crucial moment in the endgame where you're asked if you've found out what the secret is, it just takes it on trust that you do, despite the fact the secret is a single word and this would be relatively simple to do.
You may think these are just nit-picks and inconsistencies, rather than anything that actually breaks the game, and you'd probably be right. (Section 119 instructs you to lose 7 STAMINA points despite being a section that ends in a game over; maybe they just wanted to rub salt into the wound, as the game over in question involves you cutting off your own leg to escape what you think is a forest panther, only to discover it was actually a hyena.) But there are a couple of actual errors:
- The way the fight scene in the Place of Battle (the penultimate challenge of the book), which begins at section 138, works is that your allies from previous encounters join you, and you choose which of them to send out against the Dai-Oni's own allies. There are several options in the encounter which are redundant, since several of the possible allies are mutually exclusive (most notably the Ki-Rin, which can only be gained as an ally if your HONOUR score is sufficiently high, and the paths taken to get other allies don't give you the HONOUR required).
- At section 167, you remove all your armour to be able to cross a river, then throw it across piece-by-piece, but there's then an extended encounter with some monsters lurking in the river that try to steal your armour before you can make it to the other side, which comes with an HONOUR penalty if you fail to get it back... which would be fine, except it's already possible to have lost your armour in an earlier encounter in section 313 (which doesn't come with an HONOUR penalty, as you have to remove it to avoid drowning) and the book doesn't make provision for what to do if that happened. The book is also inconsistent about the combat penalty for losing your armour -- if you don't get your armour back in the path that begins at 167 then the amount of damage you take whenever you're hit in combat rises from 2 STAMINA points to 3, but when you lose your armour at 313 then the book says you lose 4 STAMINA points per hit taken.
- Sections 322 and 366 are slightly different, mutually exclusive versions of the aftermath of the same encounter with Lord Tsietsin, where you loot his private chambers and find a suit of armour. You get a SKILL bonus for finding the armour in one, but a LUCK bonus in the other, but this could have been an intentional bit of variance.
But even then I think branding this book 'broken' is a bit harsh. "Interestingly Flawed Gamebooks" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, though.
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