4cr Video Review
Muramasa: The Demon Blade
Runtime - 10:19
Developer - Vanillaware
Publisher - Ignition Entertainment
Nintendo Wii
September 8, 2009

For those still in love with the written word, the script for this review can be found after the break - increasing your chances of finding mistakes between the written text and audio narration. Sigh, we keep trying…

We really should start this off by stating a fairly obvious and oft-cited idea - the gaming industry’s mainstream blossoming has reaped a mix of glorious benefits and monotonous pitfalls. The cost of game development continues to skyrocket, while development teams can often compete with the population of small nation states, and yet there’s a nagging sense that tactile gameplay hasn’t gotten any better for all of this added attention – that the primary focus has shifted to immediate graphical prowess, rather than the functional and innovative gameplay that made this industry worth the original investment.

Amidst titles powered by massive budgets seeking to produce increasingly realistic worlds resembling our own, along comes Muramasa, a game immediately grabbing our attention exactly because of its visual style, but for entirely different reasons.

Perhaps as a result, Muramasa is a game burdened by heavy expectations - the small staff at Vanillaware already known for delivering a lush 2D visual style that links itself to the roots of the industry and lights our imaginations with what we always suspected was possible. But there’s a sense that Vanillaware is also a studio struggling to find a set of mechanics that offer the player something worth a deeper investment beneath the crafted visual seduction – or at least seeking a way to more clearly develop and voice a style of gameplay that better suits the labor of love that is their distinct visual signature.

Muramasa may also not be what gamers are expecting from the marketed visceral swordplay action, but the game delivers a unique approach to the concept that is certainly worth your time, even if the esoteric qualities make it sometimes hard to explain exactly why that is.

Thankfully for us there’s a game beneath all of these lofty ideas that we can talk about in the meantime.

Muramasa begins by offering players options that may at first appear subtle, but prove distinct. The most immediate decision is choosing between the two playable characters, Kisuke, an amnesiac ninja seeking to reclaim his memory, or Momohime, a princess possessed by a demon soul. Whichever choice takes your fancy first, the difference is most directly one of narrative.

The second decision confronting players is choosing between two game modes, which regardless of description operate as difficulty settings for the game, with the latter mode quickly proving best for the sadistic old school set. Players can also choose to tackle the game with the WiiMote and Nunchuk, or opt for either the classic or Gamecube controller.

Once these decisions have been made, the game follows a more constricted formula that guides the player through both stories, and begins a far more interesting balancing act between a high level of designer eccentricity and a quest to evolve a well worn and straight forward sense of action games.

Muramasa is boldly Japanese, preserving the original voice-over work, and offering players subtitles instead as they are guided through Japanese mythology - which often manages to reference the potentially unfamiliar, yet never takes radical detours that risk losing the player.

The story is at all times rooted in more universal and classical themes of revenge, honour, love and redemption.

Anyone who has spent time picking up and hugging cats in previous Vanillaware titles likely knows a thing or two about the studio’s delightful eccentricity. The small size of Vanillaware no doubt allows this to flourish in a way that broader and blander committee thinking will never replicate.

There’s a constant encouragement for players to stop and smell the roses, whether by dropping in to sample various cuisine in villages along the way, or by obtaining cookbooks to make meals of your own on the road. Rather than simply restoring your health with a flash, you’ll sit at a table to enjoy every bite. Add to this the occasional yawning cat, talking fox, and monkeys that guide players to hot springs for a simple soak, and you’d be forgiven for believing that Vanillaware would be fine with making a game where players simply strolled through Japan for more leisurely reasons.

It’s a refreshing approach to breaking up the action, with scenes reaching to make a more meaningful connection between players and the world of the game – which at all times feels fuller for the effort, complete with awkward bouts of humor for good measure.

Moving through this world feels like an evolution on the Castlevania formula, though players won’t be searching for hidden secrets, moving through the Japanese countryside rather than a castle, but with a map still serving as the guide and constant compass.

Rather than secrets, there are side challenges hidden in sealed caves that warn players of required levels and hold merciless challenges to extend the game. It’s not possible to move via the map, so players will often traverse familiar ground, though on occasion shortcuts are available.

But let’s not get any more distracted from the action Muramasa offers.

Primary enemy encounters occur randomly while dashing through the lush environments, when an exclamation point suddenly appears and your character finally draws their sword to combat attacking ninja, warriors and demons. These sequences tend to close off the area of battle - which likely helps preserve the frame rate followers of the studio would be concerned about, but also has the disadvantage of occasionally allowing enemies to attack from off screen.

Prior to anytime with the game, I was certain that using the up button for jumping would prove a mistake, and yet the way every subsequent attack and defensive feature has been layered over top makes it a largely smooth affair.

Players will often hold down the A button while toggling in other directions to perform power slashes, flying attacks, defensive rolls and downward thrusts.

And yet despite all the attacks, the game is much more about defense than offense. Button mashing will not get you very far, and the latter difficulty setting can be merciless even with a mastering of the control scheme. It’s all about picking moments of opportunity, and using attack strategies against certain enemies.

Add to this the fact that your sword will weaken during combat, and there’s plenty to consider during each and every battle. Players can have three swords readily available on screen, switching between them to allow worn or broken blades to mend. There are over 100 swords, which are crafted by the legendary figure Muramasa via a leveling tree that requires certain swords to be made before offering access to others. Essentially this makes the leveling of experience necessary more for gaining the ability to use increasingly powerful swords, which requires soul and spirit points players gain along the way in addition to the strength and vitality earned through some light stat grinding.

These intense moments of combat are when the game reaches the pinnacle of its aesthetic aspirations, because while it’s nice to say that the game looks like a painting, it’s an entirely other matter to move through it. And when you take the background layers, the foreground animation of enemies and your character, and then the blurring action of attacks and combat, everything culminates in a visual overload of the senses that leaves an impression on the retina long after the game is finished.

All roads lead to boss encounters, which build in intensity as the story progresses.
The first encounter might feel like a simple and non-thinking hack-and-slash, yet this evolves into later encounters where enemies exhibit increasingly complex strategies that require greater defense and planning. And then at some point you’re suddenly fighting a boss so gigantic you have to start off by hacking at his foot before he stomps you.

Muramasa is a painfully beautiful game – produced by a studio that symbolizes the word “craft” in the truest sense. Simply put, no other developer has kept the 2nd dimension as vibrant and as full of life as Vanillaware.

The background settings of Muramasa are a mixture of natural beauty and a strange sense of style resembling the painted backdrops of theater. And Muramasa is very much the theater of videogames – a curtain should pull back each time it plays. Fields often resemble knitted blankets, while crashing waves leave me imagining stagehands struggling to keep pace while moving them behind the scenes.

Vanillaware still has plenty of room to expand, to find a balance between a style of gameplay that matches the awe inspiring aspirations of the visuals, and Muramasa very much feels like a treatise between two styles rather than the perfected hybrid they will assuredly discover with future releases.

But even where friction occurs, Muramasa delivers results that will keep us busy playing and talking long after the initial release, because in the end, it is the picture worth an endless amount of words.