The Flowers Have it: Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii) Review
Let’s talk flowers. Consider the Nightshade: It’s dark purple hue is extremely beautiful looking, and deceptively glamorous. However, it is also extremely deadly, and a bite would certainly be life-endangering. Now let’s talk video games. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii) the latest game by Vanillaware and Ignition Entertainment is your nightshade. While it will certainly not kill you, its visuals are mouth-watering, but disguise an extremely fluid and hardcore side-scrolling fighter game. It is truly the Nightshade of the videogame world.
I will admit that at first I was skeptical about Muramasa. While it won several awards from its stellar showing at the E3 Gaming Convention, I was unsure, as I am not generally a fan of beat-em-up action adventures. The genre is often cluttered, and leads to guilty-pleasure type games. Never have I been more pleasantly surprised.
Muramasa named for a famous (or at least it is if you are Japanese or have access to Wikipedia) Japanese sword-smith, whose ill-temperament supposedly became infused with his swords, making their wielders become murderers or commit suicide. In the game, there are often references to this, which may be confusing. Overall, the plot is rather muddled, though as most great ninja fighting movies and games, the plot is a thin excuse for amazing fight sequences, and is not necessary for the enjoyment of the game. It takes place in Feudal Japan (the Genroku era for history buffs), where the current shogun (Tokugawa Tsunayoshi)’s thirst for power has caused a struggle for the demon blades (those forged by the sword-smith Muramasa), and their inherent evilness (as explained above) has caused demons and spirits to invade the world. There are two characters, each with their own plot-line, though they do not coincide much. Still, the plot (with the possible exception of the time setting) is almost completely irrelevant in the face of the gameplay and graphics.
The gameplay is surprisingly complex for a two dimensional hack-and-slash type game. While there is the required combo making and some button-mashing, it is also extremely important to time things correctly, especially at the harder difficulty levels. It is extremely important to learn to parry, as you have very little health, and even a few hits will be lethal. It also involves a give and take in strategy and execution; If you choose to parry an attack, it will harm the integrity of your blade, and eventually it will snap. However, the mechanism that also allows you to do special and particularly powerful and unique attacks drains the integrity of the blade, so you must carefully balance offense and defense. Also, it incorporates an interesting technique of allowing you to make “free” powerful attacks; after your swords (you have 3 to 4 at a time) “charge” for a certain amount of time, you can “unsheathe” a sword to take advantage of the timing. The liquid flow of combat thanks to these different maneuvers makes for quite an interesting mix, as different enemies require vastly different play-styles. To make matters more interesting, instead of a standard leveling up sequence where you gain abilities, you get the power to forge new swords, each with unique abilities. This allows you to make a fight style that is truly specific to you, and plays to your preferences. Unfortunately, there are no unique wii-motion controls incorporated into the game, which is a shame, because the sword slashing motions that we learned to love from such games as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess could be what potentially made this game an all time must have. There is also, sadly, no great difference between the gameplay of the two main characters Kisuke and Momohime, which is another place that this game could truly shine. Still, even if the gameplay was awful (which it certainly was not), Muramasa: The Demon Blade could carry itself on the pure virtue of its artwork.
The artwork and graphics of Muramasa, are, as you have guessed by now, the greatest part of this already worthy game. All of the visuals in the game, even the backdrops, are treated with art quality of the same level of care as a a water color, and any one frame would be worthy of hanging on a wall. The backgrounds change dynamically; transferring you from the heart of the forest, to a grassy plain, and to the rooftops of a busy Japanese city at night before your eyes. Every aspect of a scene is shown, and it the attention to the details of every little sprite (”piece” of animation) of the game is simply breathtaking. One could just stare at the game for hours, such is the power of its artwork. If you cannot play this game, I highly recommend looking up videos of it (just not youtube, those are way too low quality to do it justice) online, just to see the awe inspiring quality of the game’s artwork.
The sound production of the game is good, with well orchestrated background music. The battle sounds are a bit repetitive, but that is easily forgivable. It is a bit of shame that we cannot undersand the dialogue (it is in Japanese) because an enormous amount of care was put into making it; many game makers are content with simply putting text (for us English speakers, there are subtitles), or using some repetitive noise that never changes regardless of what a character is saying.
Overall, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a game that, should you not want to buy it, you should do whatever is in your power to get a look at some video-footage from the game. It overcomes what few setbacks that it has (there are not many) to give a full-throttled experience, coupled with artwork worthy of being hung in a museum.This game is truly a work of art.
Overall: Buy this game
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