Playthrough with Genjuro. Samurai Shodown III was released in 1995, and has a lot of major changes. There are 12 playable characters, 4 of which are brand new. Amakusa, who was the boss of the first game, is playable by default in this. The story for this game also takes place between the first and second games.

The controls were also completely changed. You now have buttons for light, medium and heavy weapon slashes, whilst the D button is for kick. In the previous games you had buttons for different kick strengths, but this game just has a single kick button. I'm glad they did this as I never liked the controls for the first two games, and the different kick strengths seemed unnecessary in a weapons based fighting game.

New features include the ability to charge up the rage gauge, which is done by holding down the A, B and C buttons, and the ability to dodge attacks by pressing the A and B buttons together. Each character also has two versions: "slash" and "bust". Characters have different moves depending on which style you pick.

Oh and it's a mid-90's fighting game so naturally it's horrendously hard for no reason. Even the first opponent you face tends to block everything, and it only gets much worse from there. This is where SNK were getting out of touch with their players, think about it. It’s 1995, the 3D games are coming into arcades and taking over, so if you want people to play Neo Geo still, why make it so a player could lose on the first opponent?

There's no point trying to beat this normally, but thankfully there's a good strat for beating this game, although it's still pretty hard to do. The plan is to jump in and do an attack in the air, which will usually cause the CPU to guard. As you land, immediately do Genjuro’s command grab and then repeat this over and over. This doesn’t just work with Genjuro either, you should be able to do it with any character who has a command grab move. I thank ohfivepro and BBH for telling and showing this strat, otherwise I would have had no chance beating this game:
   / ohfivepro  
   / lordbbh  

However, it's not a guaranteed easy ticket to a 1CC. As I've said before, I've never clicked with this series. I was failing to get very far in this at all, it took several attempts.

There is just one boss to fight in this game: a new character, called Zankuro. This guy can be a problem because he his sword gives him massive reach. He does seem to fall for the strat more than some other characters, but he can kill you in like 3 hits. When you beat him, you then have to fight him again in a single round battle, and once that's done, the game's over.

What’s the point of having Kuroko in this game if he just morphs into the character you’re playing as? This game still has mirror match CPU opponents, so I basically have to fight Genjuro twice in this run. Do you always have to fight Kuroko? He once showed up after I’d used a continue so I’m thinking you do.

This game is really dark as well. The Hyperkin cable I use already makes things darker, I have to turn the brightness up on my elgato to make it look ok, but I couldn’t stop Kuroko’s stage looking terrible due to how dark it was.

This game was censored for the AES release, meaning no red blood or fatalities when playing in USA or Euro modes. And unlike last time, there's no blood code either, which is a strange omission given how much controversy it caused when the first game was released. But I guess people had stopped caring by the time SSIII was released. Cryptically, the Neo Geo CD version of this game does have a blood code, which makes me think it was omitted from the AES version by mistake. I turned blood on via my Neo Geo's Unibios cheats.

One more thing to hate about this game: after you beat it, it doesn’t let you enter your initials! I’d give this game a 3 out of 10 but the initial entry thing lowers it to a 1 out of 10.