The Last Blade ARCADE

The Last Blade is SNK’s 1997 weapon-based fighter, set in a fictionalized late-19th-century Japan and built in the tradition of Samurai Shodown’s edged-weapon combat, though with a faster pace and more anime-influenced visual style than that series’ slower, heavier-feeling swordplay.

It introduces a dual-stance system letting players switch between a Power style, favoring stronger single hits, and a Speed style built around quicker combo chains, giving each character two distinct playstyles rather than a single fixed moveset. Its detailed hand-drawn sprite animation, running on Neo Geo hardware near the console’s graphical ceiling, made it one of the more visually ambitious 2D fighters of the late 1990s.