Love Notes – Muramasa: The Demon Blade

The fine folks at Edge Online recently posted a nostalgic love letter to Yoshi’s Island. Their poetic prowess and linguistic lyricism has half inspired me to return to that Metal Slug sonnet I never finished – a million quarters would not reveal 1/8th of Metal Slug’s beauty by the way.

The piece also reminded me that while I often enjoy looking back on the 2D of yesterday, I’m looking far more forward to the impending release of Muramasa, as the avenger of that neglected dimension today. Several of the points mentioned in the piece are easily transferable, whether we’re speaking of hand-crafted visual aesthetics, the resistance to industry trends, or the ability to create a technologically complex product that at all times retains a naturalized beauty, causing us to forget the workings of code that form to make the experience possible. And perhaps more importantly, as with Yoshi’s Island, we’ll still be talking about Muramasa fifteen years from now.

That must be the enduring quality I can’t find the proper words to express, knowing that when those titles that outsell the game this season have long since cracked and faded with the weight of age, we’ll still be playing Muramasa.

Vanillaware’s creations are the leather bound classics on the shelf of tomorrow.

Any knocks the game received upon its Japanese release seem to focus on plot, which is where the heart so often is after all. When we discuss games as art, there is inevitably some combination of aesthetic style and narrative involved, particularly when those two elements work together as in the world-renewing splendor of Okami. The sorrow here is that these discussions weren’t as prominent when 2D was king, owing more to the infancy of the industry at that time than the games. And perhaps we’re overdue for rectifying that oversight, because Muramasa isn’t just something one hangs on their wall.

Based on the time I’ve been fortunate enough to spend with the game, my focus was on movement. It is simply joyous to move through the world of Muramasa, and is something entirely different from simply looking at it. Where so many classic games offer secrets to discover and strategies to master, Muramasa has continued offering me new appreciations in the combination of movement and action I can create against the painfully detailed backdrops.

Where enemy encounters are concerned, I started remembering an idea about replayability I’d lost while serving in the endless console wars. Waves of opponents weren’t always simple fodder to stretch the distance between me and the end boss. Often the interactions between me, them, and the environment were the greater incentive for countless replays. And that idea is alive and well within Muramasa.

Muramasa offers no Wii specific controls to strain our controller weakened muscles. And yet it is a game that desperately needed to release on the Wii, specifically because it doesn’t con us into believing that we’re experiencing a new way to play that most traditional gaming experience.

Instead Muramasa offers a new way to see that gameplay, with the visual depth and unapologetic Japanese design that was everything I wanted from a game before 3D formed the new priority. It isn’t that 2D games don’t exist anymore, but rather that they are market driven nostalgia that repeatedly fail to offer even slivers of the experiences we are trying to buy back. The game is at home on the console filled with virtual remembrances of games long passed, successor to so many of those aged endeavors. While everyone argues about what makes a Wii game successful or necessary, Muramasa can simply be a game, a great game, waiting for us all to shut up and play it.

Muramasa’s split narrative, sword searching preoccupations, and two distinct play modes – with a third for the sadists among us – represents more than a gimmicky and poorly Xeroxed copy of our memories. Again it’s not about looking back, but about moving forward, to continue exploring a style and approach too quickly abandoned by most – a game worthy of long term worship and praise, rejecting the pressure to satisfy the trends of today to offer us an experience we’ll continue appreciating tomorrow.