With its beautifully redesigned graphics, its superb voice acting, and an astounding amount of new post-game content, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is an excellent remake of the first two games in the Muramasa series…or at least that’s what I wish I could say. In truth, Muramasa is the newest game by Vanilla Ware, makers of the sleeper hit Odin Sphere, and while it is at its core a good game, it is weighed down by numerous flaws.
Those who are looking forward to a complex intertwining story between Momohime and Kisuke, the two main characters, will be disappointed. Both Momohime and Kisuke have exceedingly simple and straightforward storylines and rarely do their paths cross during the course of the game. However, the focus seems to be heavily upon character development as the relationships between characters develop both obviously and subtly as players progress. Unfortunately, while the Japanese voice acting is of a very high quality and fits the setting, laziness on the part of the North American publisher, Ignition, dampens this experience. Outside of the fact that there is no English voice acting, the translation simply feels lazy. Occurrences in which characters will clearly say a name that does not appear in the text or when there is only one line of text despite a lengthy speech by a character are all too common; while the translation isn’t bad, it is frustrating to constantly be confronted with a clear difference between what is actually being said and what I am reading ad it makes me wonder how much plot and character development is being left out.
However, as expected of Vanilla Ware, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a breathtakingly beautiful depiction of feudal Japan. Everything in the game is drawn with painstaking attention to detail, even the experience bar is stylish, and in everything from fighting demons to merely buying supplies in a town the artwork is awe-inspiring proof and 2D graphics can be every bit as impressive as the most realistic 3D models. Little touches like the silhouettes of people behind windows in cities or groups of fireflies flying away ensure that the world also feels very much alive. The soundtrack is also quite good as it manages to always fit the ancient-Asia setting while still complimenting whatever is currently happening in the game. The only downside to the aesthetics of Muramasa is an excessive reuse of resources; the same NPC models appear frequently, there are multiple recolors of nearly every enemy in the game, and it is a bit disappointing to arrive in a new town or castle only to find that it looks exactly like a place I was already at except now it is tinted green instead of orange.
Ultimately, the combat is the core of Muramasa’s gameplay. Combat consists of very fast-paced swordfighting with a surprising amount of hidden depth. Despite the relatively small amount of buttons on the Wii’s controller, there are quite a few different moves that the characters are capable of, such as double jumping, slashing while dashing, rolling, charged attacks, and various other base abilities. In addition, players can switch between three swords during combat. While there are only technically two types of swords, normal swords which are fast and the standard method of attack and long swords which are slower and stronger and generally more situational, each sword has a special attack attached to it called a Secret Art, which can do anything from forming a damaging shield to shooting homing energy, and these make a substantial enough difference that Momohime and Kisuke usually do not feel identical despite having access to the same basic abilities. However, each sword has Soul Power which is consumed by various things, such as blocking or using a Secret Art; when a sword loses all of its Soul Power it temporarily breaks, making it still usable but nearly useless, and needs to be switched out for another for a few seconds to repair in. In addition to all of this, characters can perform a Quick Draw, which deals a good chunk of damage to everything on screen, when changing swords if the current one is used enough or if it breaks. Despite all this, Muramasa gives much leeway for those who desire to buttonmash their way through. Players can take up to five different items with them into combat, each of which can stack to nine, and spamming Secret Arts is surprisingly effective, so it is entirely possible for a player to item and skill spam his way through the game. On the other hand, there is enough depth to the combat that playing more strategically and picking swords with appropriate Secret Arts for encounters is also a viable method of play; the game even offers an unlockable mode in which a single hit from anything is instant death. In essence, the combat is the core of the game and is thankfully very fun, with the only strange thing about it being that losing a fight not only allows a player to restart in the same room with all items consumed during the fight returned, but the player is also put back to full health and allowed to keep any experience gained during the course of the battle.
Once again on the downside of things, the sword forging system is, well, a double edged sword. While there may be only two different base types of swords, the game contains over 100 different swords altogether, the majority of which are unique to either Kisuke or Momohime for much of the game. A fast leveling speed allows players to access a near-constant flow of new swords to forge, allowing for access to plenty of new Secret Arts to try out. While some swords simply have a stronger, bigger version of a previous ability, there is still more than enough variety in Secret Arts. Basically, if a flashy sword attack has ever been used by a character or a boss in any game ever made, there is probably a Secret Art similar to it in Muramasa. While this all sounds good so far, there is one very large, gaping flaw with this; progression is exceedingly linear. New swords will always have more attack power than older swords and while this may not be too much of a problem for swords that are only one node apart, the attack power of swords rises at such a rapid rate that players will often find themselves ditching swords with Secret Arts that they like for swords with worse abilities simply because the damage is so significantly higher. It would have made far more sense to grant access to a larger variety of swords of equal strength in a more evenly tiered format, to give more differences between swords (such as attack speed and length of each individual sword), to ditch the idea of 100+ swords and settle for about 30 upgradeable swords, or nearly any other system besides the one they ultimately chose. On a less severe note, the forging tree is pretty big and can become cluttered and cumbersome to navigate so it is baffling why there is not a way to zoom out while viewing it.
Surprisingly, the biggest annoyance in the game is probably travelling. Since Muramasa takes place in one big, interconnected world there is a lot of running around. Unfortunately, objectives are often placed far apart and much of the game is spent just running around trying to get to the next dungeon. The fact that players will be seeing nearly all of the regions with both Momohime and Kisuke and that nearly every region has at least one region that is nearly identical to it in design means that the beauty of the world ultimately is not enough to distract players from the raw tedium of it. If players have not yet found a map of a region from a merchant, they may gradually be progressing towards a goal only to realize that they should have gone up instead of down at an intersection five minutes earlier and need to backtrack. Many dungeons keep players in the boss room after completion so, if a player is unfortunate enough to have run out of Bronze Mirrors which warp to the last shrine visited, it is quite possible to have to backtrack through an entire dungeon and half a region just to begin to head in a new direction. While some battles always trigger upon entering a room, the majority of battles are random, so players may find themselves constantly being bombarded with fights in a region they are just passing through on their way to a different region or, upon finally reaching a new dungeon, run through a string of empty, identical rooms without a single encounter. The size of the game’s map is simply far too big and backtracking is far too common; while most games with interconnected maps, such as Metroid or Shadow Complex, open up shortcuts or some other sort of warp station as the game progresses, shortcuts in Muramasa are very rare (and to my despair sometimes one-way) and outside of the only semi-useful Bronze Mirrors there is no warp system until very late in the game.
Perhaps the strangest part of Muramasa is that it feels unconnected. Momohime’s story feels like the first game in a series, the one that few people prefer but still give credit to for starting the series off, while Kisuke’s feels like the more refined second game in the series. Kisuke’s boss fights tend to be easier but more interesting and fun, his Secret Arts are more useful, he fights more varied, and possibly more aggressive, enemies, there are references to things related to Momohime’s story in his but not vice versa, and his story simply has more depth to it than Momohime’s. Any meetings between the two during the course of their stories are exceedingly brief and feel closer to easter eggs than anything else. After completing both stories, quite a lot opens up, such as access to new swords, new Monster Dens (essentially gauntlets), and even alternate endings that attempt to bridge the gap between the stories and several other goodies. However, this all comes across as feeling more like fluff and ‘bonus content’ than anything else, especially since much of it feels entirely optional and pointless and even the more important new content, such as the alternate endings, involves doing things that simply go against the flow of the game, such as making every sword or once again going all the way through each character’s respective final dungeons again and equipping specific weapons for the boss fights. Even exceedingly open-ended games, such as Saga Frontier on the original PlayStation, seem to have the characters interact with each other in more meaningful ways than in Muramasa. As it stands, Muramasa does not feel like a single, unified game, but rather like a collection of two 10-hour-long games with post-game bonus content. Ultimately, at its core Muramasa is a perfectly fun action RPG that blends old and new techniques in a way that should have made it one of the best games on the Wii, if not of the generation, but it is riddled with an astounding number of minor flaws and questionable design decisions that quickly add up and greatly detract from the experience as a whole.