Thus far we have received 3 "official" reviews of "Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad" on the 360 (the game, if you are unfamiliar with it, features three females--one in a bikini and a cowboy hat, one in a schoolgirl outfit, and the third in a spandex cat-suit-like outfit--fighting zombies and other assorted creatures in an over-the-top gory action setting). Yet I wonder why the scores are so low?

The only answers I can come away with are: They don't understand satire (of course in one case it's obvious that the reviewer didn't play the game for more than an hour, tops, and didn't bother to learn the extended individual move sets for each character). Or they've forgotten what budget games are. Or they're simply afraid that non-gaming womens' rights activists will tar & feather them for saying anything kind about the game.

Yes, $40.00 does seem high for a B-game, but keep in mind what the games' lineage is (Budget Japanese PS2 games) and that most new X-Box 360 games cost $60.00+.

Personally I like the game. The story, like Illbleed on the Dreamcast, is cheesy. The characters are perfect satires of other curvy-friendly female protagonists. There's a lot of fun ways to execute the enemies. The game looks and plays good for a budget title (again, if you expect God of War II then go away). There's a decent level of challenge.

All in all, for a game designed to be picked-up and played for maybe an hour or so at a time, this is a really fun game. It's only too bad they didn't design versions of this game for the PSP & DS, where its style would really shine.

While Onechanbara: BSS doesn't deserve a perfect 100 rating, it doesn't deserve the ratings it has received. Considering that the game exceeds at what it sets out to do, I would be hard pressed to give it any less than a 65/100.

That's still not very high all things considered, but again: It's not a game setting out to be an AAA game made by a top production studio with tens of millions of dollars to toss at each games' development. It's fun budget satire.