Muramasa: The Demon Blade was actually the first game we booted up on the Wii back in our tiny office. We are huge fans of Vanillaware, the Developer of the sleeper hit Odin Sphere, which Muramasa is the spiritual successor of. Odin Sphere probably belongs to one of our top 10 favorite games on the PS2. Being a 2D game consisting entirely of hand-drawn sprites and backdrops, Muramasa is the one game that doesn’t suffer from performance issues on the Wii, and it plays perfectly on a Gamecube controller. Not that we are arguing the fact that the game should be on the Wii at all, being a hardcore title it would have sold much better on the PS3. The design decision behind Muramasa’s every gameplay aspect that differs it from Odin Sphere gave us the feeling that the developer was trying desperately to make the title more mainstream and accessible to the casual crowd (that it being on the Wii and Odin Sphere probably didn’t sell that well), but the end result of that is, what would have seemed like improvements over the PS2 title, seemed giant steps backward which make the game somewhat unremarkable — a lush painting you would pass by at the renaissance art museum, for a fleeting moment you would glance at it, be awed by its transient beauty, but then realizing that ultimately its lack of substance propels you to move on to your next destination.
There is no arguing that Muramasa is gorgeous, like the blond secretary you probably wished you had hired, who probably didn’t know what she was doing, except spreading her legs to everyone that come by to water the plants. Muramsa is fun — a wild ride, short while it lasted, repetitive even within its short moments — which you would bear with your utmost forbearance, if just to see the beautiful scenery. If Odin Sphere was a literal masterpiece, Muramasa was the Michael Bay Movie that wasn’t even loaded with over-the-top explosions. Gone was the fractured masterful storytelling from scattered view-points protagonists from Odin Sphere — yes I can probably spend 10 paragraphs describing that game which reeks awesomeness, but I will spare you the pain. Muramasa only has 2 protagonists, and their individual stories intersect loosely, but not tightly intertwined like that of Odin Sphere — the resulting plots, both of them, are forgettable. It is a shame that with so much expectation, I didn’t at all get half of what I wanted out of it.
Gone from Muramasa is the RPG aspects of Odin Sphere’s battle system, which I named the Final Fight meets Final Fantasy (with its active time bar) — which makes the game semi-turn based, at least one-sidedly (for you enemies can pound on you all they want), what probably sounds bad on paper actually made the game infinitely interesting, for you cannot button mash but had to take a rest to wait for your action bar to fill up again before you can punch your way out of your enemies. Muramasa is the antithesis of waiting, for you press your buttons and press your buttons some more, you change swords, resulting in a quick-draw flash attack move that damages everything on screen. Sure it makes the game much faster-pace and maybe more fun, probably only to imbeciles. And the most quirky part of Odin Sphere, the cooking and planting is taken out, sure you can cook in this game, but its rather pointless for you can’t really consume food during boss fights, and you cant plant your seeds on the map so they will absorb souls and ripen and bring you more experience points. Odin Sphere is a game you must play with finesse and a certain kind of open-mindedness, that the barrier of entry is high — you can’t progress far into the game until you excel at the game, and you can’t excel until you understand the rules, and you can’t understand unless you try to think about what you need to do. Muramasa IS the antithesis of thinking, and if I had to use that word again I will probably strangle myself. You just tab your buttons, kill everything on screen, follow the map and go the next waypoint, kill a few more bosses, and halfway through the game, you will probably figure out that you need to forge some more powerful swords, but you probably don’t need to, but it would be nice, and it would make you breeze through an already easy time. Unlike Odin Sphere, you level up by killing enemies, and cooking and eating don’t really make you more powerful, except giving you a necessary ingredient to forge new swords, which is an integral part of the game, but only felt like an afterthought.
I complained so much about Muramasa that, I realize, at the end of the day, there is still a lot to be liked, just that it is overshadowed by its predecessor, like juxtaposing a thirty-third book written by a famous author, next to his glorious first-time-award-winning-career-launching novel which is Odin Sphere, a high standard is hard to live up to — Muramasa isn’t at all bad, it isn’t a Too Human bending its knees to Eternal Darkness, it is still one of those games you must play if you own a Wii. It is just what it is — something beautiful and fun and fleeting, like a forgettable one night stand with that pretty hot-looking friend of a friend that you didn’t even like. This isn’t the game we looked forward to from Vanillaware. We wanted something we would remember for the rest of our lives. Well, we’ll see, they definitely have the potential to make something that will make another mark in the history of video games.
