Samurai Shodown announces Steam port, third character for Season Pass 3

Publisher SNK announced late yesterday that Samurai Shodown’s long-awaited release on the Steam storefront will be launching June 14th next month alongside the penultimate character of the game’s third season of downloadable content, series regular and seminal final boss Shiro Tokisada Amakusa.

Originally released on consoles and on PC as an exclusive first to Google Stadia, then to the Epic Games Store to the dismay of players everywhere, fans have been baying for a Steam release since the title’s launch only to be disappointed at every turn.

Now, with The King of Fighters XV on the horizon and Samurai Shodown on the brink of what could be its last season of DLC, the general tone of fan discourse is one of frustration and confusion as players wonder if the possibility of a large active PC player base has already sailed due to SNK’s delay in releasing their game on the most popular digital platform in the world, rather than two of the most universally-reviled.

Though it may not garner a significantly larger player count on Steam, dedicated players will no doubt be enthused by the inclusion of the oft-requested Amakusa as a playable character. The undead sorceror based on the real-life historical figure of the same name, has been long regarded as a fun addition to the roster if not particularly viable at the competitive level.

Appreciated more for his role in the game’s canon, being the series’ very first final boss and continuing to orchestrate pivotal events long after his first appearance, his interesting toolset and visual design gives him a villainous flair quite unlike any other member of the cast.

While excitement for Amakusa and a proper PC release is sure to be riding high, the question of season three’s final character remains and the answer is very likely to eclipse yesterday’s announcements based on what is already known.

It was announced back in March, alongside the release of Cham Cham, that one of the last two characters in the season pass would be a crossover from the Guilty Gear series, Arc System Works’ enormously popular series of anime-styled fighting games whose fourth mainline installment is due for launch this summer and precedes Samurai Shodown’s Steam launch by just a few days on June 11th.

Rumors swirled after the announcement as theorists debated just who the final two would be, some arguing that Guilty Gear Strive’s vampiric swordsman Nagoriyuki would be a well-suited inclusion but an unverified leak from data miners quashed any further speculation, declaring that based on code extracted from the game’s .exe file listing three-letter ID’s for each member of the roster, Amakusa would be taking the third slot on the pass with Guilty Gear’s one-eyed ronin Baiken being the crossover character. Yesterday's announcement leaves the leakers up by one and lends credence to their predictions, but only time will prove whether or not the pink-haired samurai is indeed Samurai Showdown’s final character.

Samurai Showdown is out on Steam this June 14th, 2021, and is available now on PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch as well as the Xbox Series and PS5 via backwards-compatibility.