The characters tend to play the same across their appearances, so I was able to take the knight Charlotte starting in the original and play similarly with her across the whole series (except for III, where she doesn't appear, much to my chagrin). Samurai Shodown is fundamentally a weapon-based 2D fighting game with characters ranging from ninjas to a French knight to a dog-wielding warrior from the USA and every freak in between.
The game is centered around the six games that were released on the NeoGeo platform between 19, plus a new version of Samurai Shodown V that made it as far as halfway through an arcade location test before corporate meddling spiked it. Haohmaru is not a fan of the doggo, apparently.
