Muramasa: The Demon Blade

Muramasa’s release snuck up on me! It came out yesterday, and despite having listed the release as September 8th in my top 5 year-end game picks post I for some reason thought it was coming out in October. But no matter, I played it for a while last night and enjoyed it immensely. Muramasa is a feast for the eyes, which sounds like a strange thing to say about a Wii game but like Vanillaware’s PS2 titles GrimGrimoire and Odin Sphere the entire game is constructed out of gorgeous hand-drawn digital artwork and animation.

In terms of  gameplay Muramasa is clearly a spritiual successor to Odin Sphere but with many notable improvements. In fact I think I’d love to see this team keep making games in this style using various mythological sources. However, Muramasa’s localization seems a rather lacking compared to Odin Sphere’s and even GrimGrimoire’s, but I’ll get to that later in the article.

Muramasa is truly a gamer’s game. Obsessive powerup and item collection, random fights galore, epic boss battles, hack and slash challenge areas with big rewards, special moves and combo rankings. I started the game as Momohime because, well, you know, she’s the hot one. I skipped the tutorial and found myself thrust straight into the action. Skipping the tutorial proved perfectly alright as the controls are very gamer-instinctive. Here’s what I mean: up to jump, A to attack, B for special move, Z for block, C to quickdraw/change weapons, and D-pad for cycling through and using items. It’s all very smooth and intuitive, and this is largely due to the fact that the game HAS NO WAGGLE. In fact there are control options for both the Gamecube and Classic Controller as well. At first I thought this game would just beg to be played with a standard controller, but the Wiimote/Nunchuck combo was just fine, especially since it doesn’t require you to wave your arms around like an idiot. Of course seeing as Muramasa completely ignores the Wii’s unique control capabilities it causes one to wonder why this game isn’t multi-platform.

The game plays very similarly to Odin Sphere but as I said before with several marked improvements. For one, eating food in restaurants doesn’t take for-fucking-ever. Eating food is actually key to not only recovering health but increasing your spirit which among other things allows you to forge more powerful blades (you can equip three unique blades with different special powers at a time, switching between them at will or when one of them temporarily breaks.) I do sort of miss obtaining healing items by planting flora that produces strange fruit or living sheep like in Odin Sphere though.

You also don’t have to sit there sucking up spiritual energy from your vanquished foes post-battle as in Odin Sphere, it automatically flies to you in Muramasa. The levels in Odin Sphere were also one big looping circle and you simply exited to the next big looping circle, Muramasa on the other hand is a series of linear areas. You can also toggle your minimap to either appear at the top of the screen, overlay the entire screen, or disappear entirely. It’s so nice to see a video game developer that doesn’t shun minimaps, I don’t care about your goddamn “clean” HUDs people, I want to be able to figure out where the hell I’m going without pausing constantly.

Like I said before, the game dumped me right into the action immediately. In fact there was no speech for the longest time, so by the time I did finally arrive at a cutscene I was shocked to find that the game is only in Japanese, subtitled, with no English voice cast to be found. This is just a tad unprecedented in gaming today, though I suppose it lends itself to the atmosphere of a game seeped in Japanese mythology and I probably would have put it in Japanese anyway.

But at the same time… it might be a little too Japanese. Now I can only speak for Momohime’s story (you can also play a different tale as an amnesiac ninja named Kisuke), maybe this game is attempting non-linear storytelling but I was so confused. I thought by skipping the tutorial I had missed some vital story information, and went back to confirm that no I had not.

The characters just immediately start throwing names of off-screen characters and heretofore unseen events and techniques in what appears to be very literally translated dialog. I eventually figured out through the dialog that an evil swordsman had attempted to transfer his soul into another man’s body with some soul transferring sword technique, but he had accidentally hit Momohime as she tried to stop him and ended up in her body by accident (the instruction booklet only says she’s posessed by a demon.) Now this is quite funny, but would it have killed them to have actually shown this part?

In just the roughly hour and a half I played the story was constantly throwing plot points and characters at me with little to no context. Some of them may be obscure mythology references that Japanese audiences would inherently recognize (just as American audiences would recognize allusions to say Paul Bunyan or something.) Okami had kind of the same thing going, but for some reason those references seemed clearer to me (alot of it had to do with good localization as well.) There is some sort of humorous things going on that only work in Japanese though, such as how the beautiful and delicate Momohime uses mannish variations of language while possessed. And of course you get hints along the way why some people are either partnering with or trying to stop the evil soul possessing her, but an opening sequence showing these hinted-at events would have helped a whole hell of alot. Although a review at IGN says the story plays out somewhat like Kabuki, which would explain alot but again what Westerner is really familiar with this style of storytelling? It begs for transliteration and localization.

The game plays great, is undeniably gorgeous to look at, but so far judging by the haphazard and cryptic story presentation it just feels kind of mindless. There’s also a drawback that at times the game has you backtracking through screens devoid of enemies. But really, most people were interested in this game for the art and the gameplay in the first place, so if you’ve been desperate for good games to justify your Wii’s existence consider that Muramasa now enjoys a spot on my top list of must-have Wii games right along side Mario Galaxy, Okami and De Blob.

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