Muramasa: The Demon Blade

Hey time for another game review. The last one was Blazblue, which turned out to be one of the greatest fighting games I have ever played, so hope you are all excited for this one.

The game, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, is a side-scrolling hack-and-slash made by the creators of Odin's Sphere. As you can imagine, the playstyle is very similar, but are about 10x more enemies and thus 10x the amount of flashier moves and combos you can execute as well. The art style is extremely beautiful, even to the extent that the backgrounds of each area you are exploring are extremely detailed and looks like it came straight out of a landscape portrait you'd see in an art museum. Which is fitting, because everything is hand-drawn.

The storyline is where this game is the real winner, and it's always good to be the best at the most important aspect of a game. I didn't get a chance to see the actual intro to any of the characters, but I got a good idea of the idea of the story from watching about 10 hours of gameplay (yes I'm reviewing this based on someone else's experience, not mine). You have a choice of 2 characters: a male ninja Kisuke, or a female kunoichi Momohime. For Kisuke, he had lost his memory after some sort of crazy incident, and he wakes up to find his own ninja clan calls him a traitor and is hunting him down. For Momohime, you actually play as a guy whose soul kicks Momo's soul out of her own body and takes over. He does this to prevent death, but a deeper story unfolds as he and Momo's soul end up having to work together to give Momo's body back while the other soul seeks a stronger body. Both arcs start off with different towns, different enemies, and a different storyline, but both share two things in common: you are fighting in medieval Japan, and you both wield demon blades forged by a cursed sword maker, and these blades require you to feed them souls. So obviously peaceful negotiations are not an option.

The gameplay is a bit short for a basic run-through, but still extremely entertaining. Every sword has a special ability, unique stats, and durability. Durability is dropped by parrying attacks and using the special ability; it is gained from feeding the sword souls or keeping it sheathed. If the durability drops to 0, then the sword is "broken" for a period of time as it regenerates from souls/sheaths. While broken, it cannot parry anything anymore and deals minimal damage, but can still be used in combat. You can carry up to 3 swords at a time (although you can keep an unlimited amount in your inventory), and you forge new swords as you level up and gain more souls from killing, and more spirits from eating and using healing items. There is a chart of swords you can forge in the game, and obviously to forge certain end-game swords you have to follow a certain path of sword forging. You also get special swords from defeating bosses in order to break "barriers" and advance further in the game, as well as unlocking forgeable swords down the chart that require the sword as a pre-requisite. Experience and levels are also gained from absorbing souls, as well as completing entire fights with bonuses, such as not being hit, or killing everything quickly.

There are a few problems with the game, but nothing really big. The biggest problem is the fact that there is no seperate button for jumping in a game that allows double-jumping, hugely important in combat and exploration. You just have to push up twice, even though it'd be more convenient to have a button configuration menu or simply allocating one of the unused ones. The game has 2 modes: normal and hard, with the difference being hard gives you more souls but you cannot parry attacks from behind and, well, everything is a lot harder. Normal mode is actually pretty easy once you start forging swords, as the enemies don't seem to scale properly with the power of the swords very well. And once you get an xp boost bonus with a sword or an accessory you can equip, well let's just say my friend hit level 70 simply by blazing through to the final boss. Oh yeah, and this game is only on the Wii, the reason why I was not able to play it.

That said, this game is an amazing game, and a couple of simple tweaks would help make an even better game if they decide to make a sequel. It is roughly about 10-20 hours of gameplay through each character's storymode once (depending on how much of an effort you actually try to find 'everything'), but the sword forging tree connects both character's paths and requires you to beat both of their paths at least once, so you to get the full experience of destroying things with angry demon swords, you have to play one character at least twice, which is fine by me. If this game was on the Playstation 3, I would pay the standard $60 price tag for it without a second thought. Instead, it's on the Wii for $50.

Final score: 9/10