At a glance: The Last Blade · Neo Geo CD · SNK, 1997 · Fighting · Score: 9.0/10
The Last Blade (1997; Bakumatsu Roman: Gekka no Kenshi) is SNK’s most beautiful fighting game, and the beauty is thematic before it is technical. Set at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, it stages its weapon duels among falling maple leaves, burning villages and shrine gates at dusk, scored like a period film and coloured like a woodblock print left in the rain. Twelve swordsmen — the wandering Kaede, the doomed Moriya, the spear-maiden Yuki, the hulking Shigen, the cheerful and terrifying Akari — fight a story of guardians, gates and a resurrection that should not happen. Where Samurai Shodown is a duel, The Last Blade is a drama that happens to be duelled.
The systems reward the mood. Each character fights in two styles: Power, with unblockable heavy strikes and greater damage, or Speed, with chained combos and quickness — effectively doubling the roster’s study load. The deflect button, tapped at the moment of an incoming strike, parries and opens the opponent for punishment; it is the game’s heartbeat, turning defence into literature. Damage is high, rounds are tense, and the AI tells its story with unusual coherence for the genre.
A big late game on a small-memory format
The Last Blade is a 474-megabit cartridge from 1997 — the CD’s nightmare demographic — and honesty requires saying the conversion shows its era: pre-match loading is among the longer waits in this package, and the disc thinks between stages of the story mode more than the early fighters do. What matters is what the engineers protected: once loaded, fights are whole. The painterly animation — the flowing scarves, the leaf-drifts, the supers’ calligraphic violence — survives essentially complete, and backgrounds keep their layered melancholy. Whatever had to be queued at the loading screen, the duels themselves were not rationed.
The arranged soundtrack is, again, a headline: the score’s strings and shakuhachi expand into recordings that match the visuals’ ambition, and the quiet tracks — this game understands quiet — gain enormously. On CDZ hardware the waits halve and the case strengthens. Judged against its own generation rather than against Windjammers, this is a conversion that chose the right thing to save.
The Last Blade fights like a poem reads: every stroke placed, every silence deliberate.
Power, Speed and the deflect
The dual-style system deserves a slower examination than most reviews give it, because it quietly doubles the game. Power style is the duellist’s path: fewer chains, heavier single strokes, access to unblockable power moves and the super that ends arguments; Speed style is the fencer’s: quick chained sequences, custom combos at full gauge, and pressure as a way of life. The same character is two studies — Moriya’s Power menace and Moriya’s Speed rush are different examinations — and the deflect binds them: a perfectly timed repel that works against either style and returns the moment to neutral with interest. Fights in The Last Blade are therefore conversations in three grammars at once, conducted among falling leaves, and the game’s famous beauty is inseparable from the thinking it frames.
The CD edition presents all of it with the era’s full presentation — the story mode’s painterly interludes included — and its arranged score does for the Bakumatsu mood what the visuals do for the eyes. The waits are the tax; the tax buys the poem at a fifth of the cartridge’s historic price. For a great many players that arithmetic has only improved with age, as the AES original climbed into the same four-figure territory as its contemporaries.
The CD version in 2026
Playing The Last Blade on the format today sorts itself into three honest options. On original hardware, a CDZ halves the waits this review describes and is the connoisseur’s route; an SD-loader-equipped machine abolishes them and is the player’s. Emulation, meanwhile, preserves the arranged soundtrack and the complete game for sampling before you commit to a disc — this library’s discs remain sensibly priced enough that sampling usually ends in owning. Whichever route you choose, judge the game by what this review has tried to keep separate: the fighting itself, which is the full arcade article, and the disc’s rhythm around it, which is a period cost modern options can now refund. The game earned its reputation at full price in its era; on CD in 2026 it asks a fraction of that price and, for the patient or the loader-equipped, gives the whole of itself back.
The verdict
The Last Blade is a masterpiece of tone — the fighting game as historical elegy — and its CD edition, loading and all, delivers the poem intact with the finest soundtrack of any version. Samurai Shodown II is the sharper duel; this is the richer evening. Both belong on the shelf; this one belongs there for the nights you want your fighting to mean something.
The cast and the gate
The story’s furniture deserves its roll-call, because The Last Blade’s cast carries narrative weight few fighters attempt. Kaede, awakening to a power he fears; Moriya, the swordsman framed and wandering; Yuki, the shrine maiden with a spear and a duty; Akari, the exorcist child whose cheerfulness is a weapon system; Juzoh’s brute comedy, Setsuna’s owl-shadowed menace, and Musashi — the undead swordsman, the boss as historical ghost story. Behind them stands the gate to the demon world and the Four Gods’ mythology, SNK’s writers working at a pitch of romantic fatalism the series’ sequel would refine further. This is a fighting game whose versus screen feels like a dramatis personae, and the CD’s story mode presents it entire.
The honest format note remains the loads — the longest in this collection’s fighter wing alongside the big KOFs — and the honest counterweight remains everything else: the art whole, the score arranged to greatness, the styles and deflects intact, at a disc price the cartridge’s ascent has made kinder every year. Poetry has a waiting room. It is furnished with a juggling monkey, and the poem is worth it.
Final notes
The sequel’s shadow falls here honestly: The Last Blade 2 refined the systems and is many players’ preference — it too reached the CD — but the original’s story completeness and cast introductions make it the necessary first volume, and this disc is its fullest home edition of the era.
Audio, once more, because this game weaponises it: the arranged score’s strings over the menu’s stillness set the evening’s register before a blade is drawn, and the CD output’s clarity is part of the work’s meaning. Some arranged soundtracks decorate. This one directs.
Patience is the price, stated for the final time without apology: the loads are long, the game is longer in the memory. Of all the discs in this collection, this is the one owners describe in the language of films and novels. It earned the vocabulary.
Short version for the shelf-talker: the fighting game as period elegy — deflects, dual styles and the finest arranged score in this collection, behind the format’s longer waits. Go in patient, in winter, through good speakers, and the poem pays its tax back with interest.
Score: 9.0/10 — The fighting game as historical elegy: longer waits, longer shadows, and a poem that arrives intact.