Chanbara takes its name from the Japanese term for swordsman cinema, samurai films with choreographed duels, and translates it into an arcade combat game centered on hand-to-hand katana confrontation. It's a limited-release title, of which little documentation survives outside Japan. It serves as a sample of how Japanese arcades drew directly on their own film and literary tradition to build characters and settings, long before the fighting genre adopted the international mold that Street Fighter and its successors would popularize.
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