SAMURAI JACK
Face iconic foes from the past in the new Samurai Jack videogame
Your essential debrief on the new, canonical videogame.
IN 2017, GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY AND HIS team finally brought the tale of the time-wandering hero Samurai Jack to a close. And that was that. Considering that it took 16 years to complete five seasons of what is now considered a modern animation classic, Tartakovsky was content with how they concluded their tale. But then Adult Swim, home to the finale season, approached him about making a canonical videogame developed by Soleil Ltd in Japan, which would translate the visual essence of the series into a playable format.
Initially sceptical, Tartakovsky tells Red Alert that his first reaction was to say, “If you’re just gonna crap it out, I don’t really want to be involved. I know it’s a business and people have to do what they have to do. But they said, ‘No, no, we want to make it really great!’”
In fact, Adult Swim Games asked Tartakovsky and his long-time writing collaborator, Darrick Bachman, to craft the game’s story so that it wouldn’t sully the finale they were so proud of, and would honour all five seasons of their cumulative storytelling. Having never worked on a videogame based on his creations, and excited about the potential of Jack in a 3D space, they agreed.
The result is Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, available this month on all major gaming formats. It brings back all of the original series’ voice actors, from Phil LaMarr (Jack) to Tara Strong (Ashi), as Jack bounces through time again revisiting prior allies and foes.
When it comes to the game’s story, Tartakovsky reveals that it takes place right before the series finale, when Jack and Ashi are in the portal that takes them to Aku. “The idea is, if we want to play a game based on a show or characters that we like, you want to do some very familiar adventures. You want to go through the stuff you watched, but in your own perspective. And with time travel and different time periods, it’s a little bit easier to find little loopholes because there’s rules, but there’s no rules,” he jokes. “That seemed really attractive, and because they were willing to financially make all these different characters – the Scotsman, the Mongo, Aku, and all these things through Jack’s past that we’ve seen as an audience – it made it much more tempting and fun.”
Bachman’s role was to turn the concept for the game into a narrative. “First and foremost, we worked out a story across what would essentially be an episode of the series and then tried to figure out how to break it up across each level; how you can push the boundaries of the narrative, and how each level can elevate everything that the character is feeling,” Bachman explains. “Then I started thinking about what is there new that we could explore from Jack’s character, especially in contrast with what he experienced in the fifth season. So, we really sat down to try to craft something different for Jack to experience.”
What Bachman focused on was the idea that when Jack is knocked out of the portal in the series, he becomes disorientated as he’s thrown back out of time again, unsure
of his ultimate life goal to stop Aku. “As it progresses in the game, [Jack] starts to realise what happened,” Bachman says. He’s helped along by Ashi, his enemy-turned-love in season five. She appears throughout the game as a non-playable character to coax him back towards the showdown with Aku that ends the series.
“It’s almost like he realises that he has to keep climbing the ladder to get out,” Bachman says of the game’s ultimate goal. “Aku keeps stacking elements against him, but he’s realising that with all the progression that he makes, especially as Ashi gets closer and closer to him, it becomes clearer that the path that he’s on is the correct path. He just has to see it through and realise that these elements are things that he’s familiar with, but they’re not exactly the same as he knows.”
Deeply impressed with Soleil’s work, Bachman says he and Tartakovsky have been delighted to see some of their favourite sequences from the series come to life in a totally different way inside the game engine. Specifically, he praises a level that is based on the season three episode “Jack And The Zombies.” “Jack fought these zombies in a graveyard and seeing that scene, at that level, realised in 3D was just amazing. It’s really spooky and atmospheric, and it’s really fun to play.”
Confirming that this is truly the coda for Samurai Jack mythology, Bachman hopes that the game will satisfy fans who were hoping for one more adventure with the character. “Japan Soleil, they’re huge fans of the show and they’ve gone above and beyond to try to make it seem exactly like the show would be. So it becomes very thrilling to just be able to play Jack.” TB
Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time is released on 21 August for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.