Sengoku (W) / Sengoku Densyo (J)

[Source]
Crossed Swords / Sengoku Densyo
Scitron / Pony Canyon  PCCB-00076  Nov 21, 1991
[Generator]
MAME 0.244 (modded by Valley Bell)

"Sengoku" is a first-party Neo Geo title that
happens to be SNK's first beat-em-up on the
platform. It sends two men on a quest to
destroy an evil warlord who had been defeated
by their ancestors centuries ago, a quest that
will send them back and forth between the human
world and the yokai world, and grant them the
ability to transform into other characters
should they defeat certain foes.

Unfortunately, their quest will be full of
hardship, and not in a fashion enjoyable to the
player, as hitboxes are wildly inconsistent,
enemies can cheap-shot them in ways that
require heavy memorization to avoid, and
there's almost no healing apart from collecting
ten green orbs (ten!) to restore one of six hit
points, in a game where they can lose two of
them to one sword swing.

This is especially tragic, because the graphic
artists and audio team clearly put their all
into this game to sell the player on the mix of
post-apocalyptic wastelands and mysterious
cloud worlds. These settings are backed by a
mix of synth instruments and traditional
Japanese music, the latter of which gets the
spotlight every time you take a trip to the
yokai dimension. As usual with pre-bankruptcy
SNK, the music is on point and designed to
showcase the system's audio hardware at every
turn (Look! The "Illusionism" tracks have a man
singing!). This pack should be well worth a
listen outside the game itself.

Some notes on quirks of this pack:
* The aforementioned singing is done with
  lengthy samples, and as such, seeking to
  different sections of the "Illusionism"
  tracks will cause those samples to be cut
  off. "Mononoke" also has lengthy female
  vocals in the background accomplished the
  same way, and thus will have the same
  glitches if you do the same thing.
* Several track titles are difficult to
  translate, as the album track list gives
  readings that translate to other words in a
  form of wordplay. For example, the kanji for
  track 22 would imply the reading "Oni no Ka"
  and the translation "Oni Transformation", but
  the track list gives its reading as
  "Mononoke", a term for a Japanese variety of
  ghost that is usually written with different
  kanji. In some cases, these are translated,
  while in other cases, I had to leave them
  romanized. The exception is "Hitoyogiri",
  whose kanji points to that variety of
  shakuhachi, but whose reading is given as
  "Ichiyogiri" for reasons I'm unsure about.
* Some titles are also derived from Buddhism
  ("Prajna"), or are titles that do not appear
  in Japanese but have meanings in Chinese
  (e.g. the kanji for the title "Ghost").

— The Golden Horse

Source: VGMRips