Baiken Announced For Samurai Shodown

SNK officially revealed Baiken as the latest guest character for Samurai Shodown on Monday. Originally from Guilty Gear, the pink-haired samurai is one of numerous guest characters now featured in Samurai Shodown.

HERE COMES DAREDEVIL

Baiken’s trailer for Samurai Shodown finally revealed her as the Guilty Gear guest after months of speculation. During the second Japan Fighting Game Publisher Roundtable, SNK announced an unknown Guilty Gear character as DLC in season three. While some thought Nagoriyuki from Guilty Gear Strive may fit, Baiken joins the SamSho roster on August 19.

【EU】BAIKEN｜SAMURAI SHODOWN × GUILTY GEAR –DLC Character

Though the one-eyed fighter returned to Guilty Gear in Xrd’s Rev 2 update, she is still absent from Guilty Gear Strive. So far, Goldlewis and Jack-O’ are the first DLC characters featured in GGST.

HOW BAIKEN WORKS

Baiken’s super is now a Weapon-Flipping Technique. Source: SNK Global

As a guest character, she retains some components of her toolkit from Guilty Gear. For instance, one super now functions as a Weapon-Flipping Technique, which is a crucial element of SamSho’s metagame.

Samurai Shodown 2019 retains key gameplay mechanics from previous games like “Super Special Moves” and “Fatal Flash” attacks, also known as Issen. Baiken’s gameplay keeps these mechanics in play while seeming to have more combo potential than many other characters, due to her Guilty Gear background.

SAMURAI SHODOWN’S GUESTS

She joins a growing roster of guest characters and series staples. Samurai Shodown 2019 also features Warden from For Honor, Gongsun Li from Honor of Kings and Hibiki Takane from The Last Blade. This DLC release marks the last scheduled character release for season three and follows the release of Amakusa back in June.

THE CURRENT STATE OF SAMSHO

While Samurai Shodown currently lacks rollback netcode, the fighting game community has been critical of SNK’s handling of the franchise. Many community members have expressed frustration of characters being added to a game “they can’t play online” due to the game’s poor netcode and lobby system. Nevertheless, some figureheads like James Chen turned to Parsec servers as a partial solution to the problem. This simulates an offline experience through cloud computing, but is still imperfect.

Following the announcement of rollback in KOF XV, some players hoped SNK would revisit Samurai Shodown’s netcode. The company even went as far as flying a test build to France, hoping to fix input delay before launch. Interestingly, the Series X version of Samurai Shodown even features a 120 fps mode, which is rare for fighting games.

Despite these efforts, SNK seems contempt with SamSho’s current offerings as a product. It seems that for many players, their best bet will be waiting for offline events to start hosting the game again. The Baiken Samurai Shodown announcement comes at an awkward time for the competitive title, but Guilty Gear and SamSho fans alike will certainly embrace the game’s newest guest.

STAY CONNECTED

Featured image courtesy of SNK Global

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