Much like the samurai you control, the player is left upon the muddy, blood-stained battlefield of Kuchihagahara, a once peaceful valley resting in the center of war torn Amana, without any sense of purpose or direction. Your old lord is gone, and you must now carve out a new life for yourself.

Players and critics often discuss the notion of “meaningful choice” in games, but rarely is there any meaning to those options. Simple decisions of supporting a dwarf that wants to study magic in Dragon Age: Origins earn you an additional wall of text at the end of the game, but what’s the actual meaning behind that decision? It may be more accurate to claim that players and critics want choices that have visible results.

Way of the Samurai 3 was recommended to me by my roommate when I mentioned wanting to write an article about agency in games, the idea of character choice, player choice, and the sense of free will. Typically when considering a topic like agency the mind goes between games like The Elder Scrolls, which are about the player wandering a sandbox world filled with quests that also happens to have a story quest if they so feel like pursuing it, to the opposite spectrum of games such as Halo, where player choice is limited to which weapons to equip and what particular battlefield tactics to exercise. Somewhere in the center are Bioware games like Mass Effect, where they have a linear story but will still allow the player some sense of freedom in their approach and what sort of personality the protagonist will have.

This is not quite how Way of the Samurai 3 approaches agency. Instead of having a single story to tell, it drops the player into a situation. The Sakurai Clan, the former Lord of Amana, has fallen to one of the servants. Shozen Fujimori now takes control, planning to join the constant warring between the fiefdoms of Japan, hoping to conquer Oda Nobunaga and rule all of Japan. On the opposite spectrum are the Ouka clan, a group of Sakurai loyalists and those displeased with Lord Shozen. Stuck in the middle are the villagers in the hamlet of Takatane, longing for nothing more than to till their fields and live a peaceful life of hard work and bountiful harvest.

Each of the three factions represent a different philosophy. Shozen represents a desire for power and to rule over all others. Ouka, or rather many of its key characters, represents a desire to fight for something meaningful and true. The village is a life without fighting, a life of peace, family, and work.

The player doesn’t necessarily progress through a story, but rather through events or “inklings”. If a player approaches an area where an “inkling” is present, a cut-scene plays out involving a key character. The player can interrupt this cut-scene by either bowing and turning away at the start, or by drawing their sword and engaging in combat. The player can kill any character they choose, but if they do so then any further story events relying on that character are locked out. Such actions can also cause certain characters or clans to try and attack you on site. Just as the player can become popular amongst a certain group of characters, they can also become rather unpopular.

This is what makes the game replayable, and also why simply dropping the player in is an excellent choice. There are characters scattered here and there that help inform the player of instruction, but on the whole the player is given very little information. They won’t know where to go or who to speak to. Normally I might consider this a bad thing, but this gives the instruction manual actual purpose. It is filled with information that tells the player all they need to know without being overly verbose. An old school approach of reading the manual before playing the game will prepare the player for their first journey through Amana, and there will be nothing to slow them down on their second, third, or even tenth time in.

It is also good that any one ending can be reached in a matter of hours, then. Anywhere from two to five hours is all a player will need to explore a new faction and set of decisions, seeing how the game might change. That is, unless the player dies, in which case they’ll be sent right back to the beginning. Or they choose to leave Amana, which is also an option.

The actual game mechanics are, for the most part, rather simple. Combat is a simple hack-and-slash affair at its most basic level and a strange combo-tastic set of abilities and moves at its most complex. Most players, on easy difficulty at least, won’t be needing to master anything complex. Kick an enemy to force them to drop their guard or throw them to the ground and hack away, or simply dodge their attacks and strike when they leave an opening. The real key to combat is to collect money and weapon parts in order to have the blacksmith upgrade your weapon or build a new one.

Or course, building a new one isn’t as simple as it sounds. A powerful weapon might also be heavy, resulting in slow swings and being left more open. Putting together the right parts is key to creating a strong, swift, blade.

All in all combat is a bit imperfect, and mastering some of its systems are difficult and opaque enough as to not seem worthwhile. It’s certainly worth trying, however, in order to score instant kills that can blend into chain-killing combos. It’s the difference between being a good fighter and being a demon on the battlefield. Fortunately, however, there’s no real need to be anything more than “good”, and to become a master is optional.

The greatest reason you’ll need to know how to fight is to accomplish a variety of jobs. Each clan has a person available to offer tasks for the player to complete and offers money in return. This is perhaps where the game breaks down the most, however. A lot of the jobs end up being repeats, with very little variety in their style, and they often require the player to search an environment for a long time for people or objects hidden in the most obscure corners of the map. While this is not always the case, it’s more of a relief to be told to go find someone and kill them rather than to go find three runaway children.

It is particularly irritating because time passes rather swiftly. Oddly enough, due to the time passing and the character events scattered throughout, Way of the Samurai 3 reminds me more of Harvest Moon than any other game I’ve played. Even so, the world is certainly more dangerous once night falls, not to mention it becomes harder to see anything. As a result, it’s typically better to be finishing up jobs by nightfall, rather than spending an entire day trying to find a silly hidden object stuffed in some random corner of the battlefield.

On the whole, I’d say Way of the Samurai 3 was a surprisingly excellent game. You can tell it is a budget title, but it isn’t trying to be a mega smash hit blockbuster game. It’s trying to be a novel experience, Harvest Moon with samurai. While you can certainly choose a faction, anyone who learns the different “inklings” well enough will likely be able to play across a variety of events with different NPC’s before making a choice which ending they’d like to try, while experimenting with handling certain characters or events differently. Even the endings can turn out differently by a single choice right before credits roll.

In the end, the choices truly are meaningful. Even if you can replay the game again in an afternoon, the player’s allegiance will change the very ending of the game and thus how things turn out for Amana and its people. Even if it isn’t an epic story, it is certainly personal.