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If arthouse developer Vanillaware is known for anything, it's creating games that can aptly be described as ornate, both in the visual and tangible sense.  Among the studio's creations, Muramasa the Demon Blade stands out as perhaps the most beautiful and sensible.  Even if it doesn't completely escape the flaws of Vanillaware's brand of game design, the title ultimately prevails to fit the designation "action RPG" perhaps more than any other game I've seen.

 

For those not familiar with Vanillaware, they are most famously responsible for Odin Sphere - a 2007 PS2 action RPG that showed us what 2D sprites could look like on modern hardware, but was also pretty zany in its design.  A lush recreation of Richard Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen, the game dragged players down a timeline of five intersecting stories over 60+ hours while making them study complicated role playing systems.

 

Now we get Muramasa for the Wii - a chronicle of two warriors' quests across fairytale Japan that has players gather up 108 swords.  In its core game design, Muramasa is quite tame compared to Odin Sphere, going for a more even balance between action and RPG, but it maintains the baroque presentation of its predecessors.

 

I'm going to go ahead and say this now - Muramasa is the best-looking Wii game I have ever seen.  Not just in terms of 2D graphics or art or the engine, just the best-looking Wii game period.  Good graphics, in their original purpose, are supposed to break down the player's disbelief, to let through as few flaws in their believability as possible.  I haven't seen any Wii game do this better than Muramasa.

 

The art that director George Kamitani brings into Vanillaware's games basically amounts to full-size paintings that you're walking and fighting through.  What makes the experience stick in terms of feeling like a legitimate Asian fairytale here is how that artistic fidelity is applied to the setting and then utilized within it in continually shocking ways.

 

One of my favorite moments in Muramasa is when one of its later, scarier-looking bosses engulfs the entire screen in black clouds but can be seen mysteriously moving through them to attack you.  It turned the battle into a visual display that was simultaneously enchanting and intimidating.

 

 

From things like that, to boss sprites spanning several screens, and some pretty unbelievable character designs (wait till you fight the thunder goddess), just seeing what else is in store becomes a major reason to keep playing Muramasa.  The mood that all of this evokes is completed by an appropriately heavy soundtrack from Vanillaware's designated composer.

 

A game with Odin Sphere's deeply insistent European tone was right up composer Hitoshi Sakimoto's alley, as he's made the motif his home through his work on games like Final Fantasy XII, Vagrant Story, and most recently Valkyria Chronicles.  As far as I know, the traditional Japanese folk music that Muramasa demands is new ground for him, but he slides into it quite gracefully.  The result is a soundtrack that stands out in Sakimoto's portfolio but still carries the weight and seriousness that he's known for.

Muramasa is every bit as serious a tale as Odin Sphere, it's just set in a different corner of the world.  Thus, Sakimoto's music must and does make the same adjustment while maintaining the same density.  Much of Muramasa's score sits pleasantly in the background, but a few tracks will stand out for players, particularly one of the dramatic themes set aside for a couple of the game's signature duels.

 

The last of Vanillaware's traits that makes the transition to fairytale Japan in Muramasa is their ability to tell multifaceted stories that, if nothing else, feel mature and deep for the right reasons.  Odin Sphere's five separate but intersecting stories nicely filled out a Norse-inspired world.  Muramasa similarly fills out its own world but in a smaller narrative package.

 

Muramasa only tells two stories over around 20 hours (with a good deal of cool unlockables afterwards), and they barely make contact with each other throughout the main game.  That doesn't stop them however from fully and intelligently traversing not only the fantasy of Japanese mysticism, but also the complexities of medieval Japanese politics.

 

Even if the story is hard to follow at times because of its relative density, it still feels perfectly in place.  I would say that sticking with the original Japanese voice acting was definitely the right move for Ignition Entertainment, but Odin Sphere had dual audio, and Muramasa doesn't.

 

Unfortunately, with all this style, Muramasa falls into the same trap that Odin Sphere did - repetition.  Odin Sphere's Achilles heel was that high art fidelity coming out of an essentially indy developer inevitably necessitates recycling of assets.

 

 

Many of Muramasa's 20 or so areas use the same backgrounds and themes, and the game requires a lot of back-tracking.  This isn't nearly as bad as how Odin Sphere took each of its five stories through the same six environments over 60 hours, but it's still noticeable that true unique level design really isn't Vanillaware's forte.  Despite this, the environments are all so beautiful that seeing them repeated is essentially painless.

 

To many players, the most prominent asset of Muramasa is how it has taken Vanillaware's florid presentation style and applied it to a totally new setting and taken the transition in stride.  This is definitely one of the main things that made Muramasa worth purchasing for me, but to an extent, Vanillaware really only met expectations in this area.  Where the studio seems to have taken a hard look and curbed their ways a bit for a surprise is in core gameplay design.

 

Muramasa still offers a pretty unique RPG experience like its predecessors, but it also focuses more on straight action than any of them ever did.  The result is something that feels broad in how it challenges players, but doesn't get too complex; accomplishing what most action RPGs fall on their faces attempting.  Trying to combine visceral hack n' slash combat with all the intricacies of RPGs usually creates a mess.  Muramasa sort of let's players choose between the two.

 

Upon booting the game up, players are asked to choose between "Musou" and "Shura" modes.  Looking at the in-game descriptions paints the modes as equivalents to "casual" and "hardcore" respectively, but really players are choosing the brand of their experience more than the difficulty.

 

Muramasa has been billed just about everywhere as an RPG, and it does appeal directly to RPG fans with leveling, equipment, various items, and its own unique system for gaining those things.  It's not out of its mind like Odin Sphere though.  You won't be planting and harvesting sheep in the middle of battle.  The most you'll do is look for the components and recipes for foods and swords.  Opposite to that though are the combat intricacies of a pure action game.

 

To forge swords in eventually earning all 108, players will need stats and resources gained from defeating enemies but also from cooking and eating food.  Budgeting what to buy, cook, eat, and eventually forge becomes one of the main priorities in Musou mode.

 

 

In RPG fashion, grinding and taking on extra content leads to faster advancement.  Actual combat in Musou mode on the other hand mostly let's players get away with button mashing as long as they keep the aforementioned gameplay in check.

 

Survival in Shura mode on the other hand (which I started and finished the game on) demands the skills of one versed in hardcore hack n' slash games like Ninja Gaiden.  Enemies in Shura are always scaled to the player's level, so whether you're level 1 or level 50, most of them can usually kill you in three or four blows.  When every enemy is a legitimate threat, learning how to dodge, counter, and capitalize for combos is critical.

 

At the same time though, because enemies scale to the player, leveling up and managing stats rarely has any tangible effect on combat in Shura.  Because enemies are encountered more often, forging swords is also much easier in this mode.

In the game's incorporation of "choice" between two gameplay styles returns perhaps Muramasa's only major annoyance - that repetition again.  Players looking for a more action-oriented experience will probably wonder why there is so much back tracking.  The individual areas play out mostly like side scrolling levels, but they all make up a big, persistent world that's supposed to be traversed like an RPG.  The best you can do is recognize that any boredom in progression stems from this conflict.

 

The whole concoction in the end creates a gameplay experience that is unusually well-rounded in its fun.  The system for cooking and forging swords isn't as deep as what you do in a lot of RPGs, but it does fill the game out.  The combat definitely feels much faster than Odin Sphere (and the frame rate is much more stable), but you can still tell it was put together by an RPG developer.  Action enthusiasts might point out the missing minutia, but what's there works and actually demands it be fully exploited for once.

 

Bottom Line

Out of all Vanillaware's creations, I think Muramasa will end up standing out the most.  Their other games were so thick as to corner themselves into the niche hardcore JRPG territory inhabited by Disgaea and Shin Megami Tensei.  As one of the best-looking games on the Wii with a truly mature presentation, Muramasa maintains the appearance of that thickness, but is actually more accessible upon closer inspection, creating an action RPG that might seriously satisfy fans of both genres.

 

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