Muramasa: The Demon Blade

Have you ever been out on the porch on a warm sunny day in late summer, sitting quietly reading or drinking tea and suddenly you become aware of the vast blue sky, the tranquil white clouds, the rustling of leaves in the wind and the sheer overwhelming beauty of this delicate world in which we exist? Ever have one of those moments? Well, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a package deal of exactly those kinds of breathtaking, shimmering experiences. The particular type of gorgeous visions you’ll enjoy in Muramasa are distinctly Japanese in flavor, but transcendent in their sublimity. Oh, and there’s some kind of game about running around, fighting and collecting swords hidden somewhere in amidst the splendor as well.

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Muramasa: The Demon Blade
Platform: Wii
Played For: about 7 hours

Muramasa: The Demon Blade is the newest game by George Kamitani and his company Vanillaware, and is thus the spiritual sequel to the PS2 classic Odin Sphere. Forgoing the western fairy tale setting of the previous game, Muramasa returns to its Japanese roots. Muramasa is set in a fantasy version of 16th Century Japan, when the Tokugawa Shogunate first unified the country and ruled out of Edo, later to become Tokyo. These were the days of samurai and ninja and legend, and the period is frequently exploited in Japanese fiction as a setting for fantasy and horror. Anime such as Ninja Scroll, Youtouden and Youma are good examples. The stories tend to feature themes involving unification versus domination, hapless peasant villages squashed by soldiers and then avenged by secret ninja clans, demons seizing power in the high Court and trying to bring about the end of the world. In short, lots of stories inspired by a period of great societal disruption and change.

Muramasa, in particular, was an actual person in history, a famous sword smith whose blades somehow acquired a reputation for inspiring their bearers to ruthlessness and blood thirst. Like Elric’s cursed blade Stormbringer, the Muramasa swords were thought to irresistibly crave blood when drawn. Tokugawa Ieyasu, Shogun of Japan at the time, also helped to make the blades famous by publicly disliking them… suddenly Muramasa blades became, in the popular conscience at least, the perfect tool for assassinating Shoguns.

This is just a taste of the background story in Muramasa. As this period of Japanese history is extremely familiar to a Japanese audience, the details mentioned here and many more are accepted for granted in the game, thus making it a hard story to follow for your average western player. The world that Muramasa catapults you into, however, is deep and involving even if you can’t always tell what the characters are up to. Rendered in loving detail throughout, Muramasa is brimming over with Japanese arcana… in your travels you’ll meet magical fox women and ninja, samurai and ghosts, traveling monks and goblinoid kappa.

In this game you control one of two characters, in one of two difficulty settings. Monohime appears at first to be a daring female ninja, but is actually just a female body possessed by some male spirit demon. The actual princess travels along as a tiny bobbing spirit flame, showing up for cut-scenes and occasionally repossessing her body (you can always tell the body occupancy by the way the character sits… the male demon has one knee up, the princess has the more subservient hands in lap position. While this doesn’t add up to any great statement for empowering women, it does reflect the thought and culture of the time period.) The second character is Kisuke, a somewhat generic ninja guy on the outs with his clan and trying to get back in favor.

The two characters run along parallel story tracks, and as they collect or forge new swords they open up new weapons for each other. It thus makes sense to alternate play between them, keeping the characters roughly matched in level and progress. This is artfully encouraged by the game, which allows you to store both ongoing stories in the same save file. You can only save when a character reaches a save point, but these appear to be regularly spaced and frequent enough to not cause any great inconvenience.

One of the biggest draws for the game is the fine array of phantasmagoric boss battles. At the end of each chapter you encounter some kind of huge monster or otherwise skilled opponent that takes tons and tons of slashing to take apart. You’ll face gargantuan centipedes, extremely tall samurai, Oni (Japanese ogres), a samurai woman riding a skeletal ghost steed, and all manner of other overwhelming beasts. Each boss requires you to adapt your strategy to counter their moves and attacks, and the fights can get rather challenging on the harder difficulty setting.

Unfortunately, you will have to do quite a bit of tracking and backtracking across Feudal Japan in order to reach each of these climactic confrontations. Perhaps because the game is particularly proud of its imagery (it has good reason to be) you are required to see it over and over again as you dutifully march over familiar ground. Magical barriers impede routes until you collect more powerful swords, and special monster lairs scattered randomly throughout the map will have you returning through the same locations time and again. Hey, at least you’ll start to really know your Feudal Japanese geography… that’s got to be useful for something, right? Also, you’ll occasionally encounter monkeys, who are very clever little devils in the real world, but in this game they’ve gone the extra mile, running a bunch of exclusive hot spring resorts that have no real function other than getting the main characters to take their clothes off.

It is strangely satisfying, however, to allow your character to sit in the hot springs and imagine how comfortable it must feel, letting the hot mountain water suffuse your skin as a bunch of wise-faced monkeys cavort on the rocks nearby… it is exactly this brand of purposeful immersion in Muramasa that will also suck you into the dangerously beguiling cooking system. Muramasa is really not a good game to play while hungry, as the main characters are constantly cooking, preparing and eating amazingly tasty-looking Japanese food in order to regain health. When you stop at a restaurant in the game and order some sushi, the plate arrives with the specific type of sushi arranged lovingly on a green leaf. Each time you push the A button, the character takes a bite, often commenting on how delicious the food is as they eat. This is painstakingly realistic… my wife and I found it impossible not to run out for sushi after playing the game for an hour, and I’ve been drooling after each subsequent session for kitsune udon, tempura, mochi, and the like. Heck, this game even makes yams look great!

Like the many fine Ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) it is patterned after, Muramasa is a game that can carry you away to another world. It is an attempt to immerse you in a fantasy of Japanese history, and it is a very satisfying experience for those with the patience and willingness to be drawn in. Muramasa may not be anything extra special as a fighting game or as a story, but as an imaginary, visual wonderland it is certain to capture your heart.

Will I play it more: It does go very well with hot O-cha and a sushi dinner.