Saturday, November 28, 2009

Muramasa is Great, Backtracking without Purpose is Not

Muramasa: The Demon Blade is an interesting game. It elicits interesting responses from me. I usually don't stare at awe of how pretty graphics are - but this game makes me do that. I've found myself stopping several times to look at and appreciate the beautiful art and animation.

None of your "realistic" looking games have ever made me do that - I'm looking at you, Call of Duty, Gears of War, etc.

The battle system calls to mind a sort of 2-D Kingdom Hearts style, without the strange menu system. Of course, the game being 2-D avoids the main problem I and many others had with Kingdom Hearts - a crappy camera! Also, compared to Kingdom Hearts, the enemies in Muramasa are a treat - they are full of personality and animation. You know how many different kinds of enemies the great Castlevania games have? Muramasa seems to have as many as that, with the added bonus of being completely original.

So I'm slowly getting the hang of the combo system. There are a ton of different swords in this game, and although I am not very far, they all seem very different and seem to have unique combos. I tend to prefer the fast swords that let me dance all around the screen, so far, but we'll see how some of the more powerful slow swords turn out.

But my god, what is with the backtracking? As much as I love having the luxury of looking at the awesome background graphics in this game, it is damn tiring spending as much time as you do going back across all the ground you have already covered. It's hard for me to say, too, whether or not this would be helped if they include random battles - it probably wouldn't help very much, honestly. It'd probably frustrate me more. But there has to be a middle ground - how about a warp? Or the ability to let me go to the big map screen when I complete an area and sort of let me "warp" around? Every time I beat a boss, I have to put the game down because I know I'll have to spend like 10-15 minutes wandering through empty screens to get to the next area.

The story so far is confusing. I believe it is intentional, but regardless of whether or not the writers wanted me to be confused on purpose, I still don't enjoy it. Something about a soul, trying to get somewhere, or something, and like another soul is forced out of its body and it follows it around, and some girl with her boobs hanging out is helping you, I don't know. It all seems somewhat dumb. Plus, the voice acting is all in Japanese, which I'm told is for the weeaboo audience who prefer it that way - I'll never get that. Unless you speak Japanese, why favor that language for voice acting? You say its quality? But most people don't speak the language - how can you tell if it is quality or not?

Anyway, I'm only a few hours in at this point. I'm sure I'll have more to say about the game soon enough.

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