The blunted blade

Japan's greatest swordsmiths, Masamune and Muramasa, were not contemporaries, but there are several legends involving both of them. One tells of a competition in which each one forged a sword and lowered the blade into a river. Masamune's sword seemed to be inert: fish swam up to it, the flowers floating in the river brushed by without harm. Muramasa's blade, in contrast, cut everything it touched. The fish were split in two, the flowers sliced to ribbons, and the very air hissed in pain as the weapon cleaved it. A passing monk saw the display and chided Muramasa, pointing out that Masamune's sword cut no undeserving thing, while Muramasa's blade killed indiscriminately. Time and legend have ascribed a bloodthirsty, evil aspect to Muramasa's swords, and it is this reputation that Muramasa: The Demon Blade aims to evoke.

Vanillaware, the creators of Muramasa, are probably best known for their 2007 role-playing game Odin Sphere, a game which was marked by a beautiful coherence of story, play, and symbolism. It would not be fair to expect another masterpiece of this quality, but I did expect the resemblance between the two games to be more than skin-deep. If you come to Muramasa looking for gorgeous 2D graphics and a fantastic score, you will not be disappointed. Unfortunately, the simplistic story and uneven design of Muramasa make it a hollow and repetitive experience.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade features two stories: that of the princess Momohime, possessed by the spirit of an evil swordsman, and that of the amnesiac ninja Kisuke. Unlike Odin Sphere, where the stories of the five main characters were intertwined in often surprising ways, these two tales have little besides backstory and a few shared characters connecting them. Moreover, the story is presented in very spare fashion, rarely offering anything more than a few lines of dialogue to explain why a particular boss must be fought or where to go next. There is no rich, textured narrative here, and as a result the game feels more like a quickie tour of Japanese folklore than a coherent story. The romance between Kisuke and Torahime is too understated, and Momohime's dedication to the reprehensible Yukinojyo is unmotivated and frankly sad.

The world of the game is, of course, feudal Japan, divided up into the provinces from the era of the Shogunate. These provinces appear in the game as a series of connected rooms (or zones, if you prefer), with some limited internal geography that must be traversed with light platforming. Sometimes these rooms are filled with enemies from the outset, in which case they can either be fought or bypassed. Random encounters also occur in these rooms, instead of in a separate battle stage, although when this happens the room no longer scrolls and the player must fight in the window onscreen at the moment of attack. Defeated enemies lose their souls, which can then be used to repair broken blades and forge new swords. Eating food (to provide "Spirit" to the character) is also necessary to forge additional weapons. The cooking element is very light, however, and most of the recipes rapidly become irrelevant because they have too small of a healing effect relative to the size of the life bar (which expands more than 50-fold over the course of the game).

The difficulty and complexity of combat, for the most part, depend entirely on the player's choice of "Muso" or "Shuro" play. In Muso mode, most battles can be won with sheer aggression, with the exception of some bosses and the random encounters I discussed in the previous post. In Shuro mode the fighting becomes more complex and tactical, although many enemies are still susceptible to a strategy of continual attack. Momohime and Kisuke have exactly the same controls and abilities, however, so the only real difference in gameplay between their respective stories is a few field enemies and the bosses. Even this disappears late in the game, when they gain the ability to fight each other's bosses. At that point the game reaches a repetitive nadir, but one that must be slogged through in order to level both of the characters up enough to wield the game's final sword and see the "true" ending. Leveling up the characters to defeat major enemies is generally unnecessary because your foes seem to scale with your level, particularly the bosses and the enemies leading up to them.

The troubling thing about these various components is that they all seem disconnected, or even opposed. The RPG elements, particularly the massive life bar, make the game's simplistic cooking system largely irrelevant. The scaling of enemies makes the leveling irrelevant, but at the same time, participation in the monotonous combat can only be justified by the need to level. The brilliant composers at Basiscape created a score that allows the battle music and field music to switch seamlessly between bars, and the battles take place without a screen swap, but the wonderful effect this has on the game's continuity is ruined by the scroll-lock and post-battle EXP screen. You run around collecting souls all game, but the story essentially ignores this grim task. Moreover, the need to do it has no real bearing on the gameplay — unless you consistently run from every battle you will have little trouble gaining the souls required to forge all the swords twenty times over by the end of the game. Muramasa is fundamentally incoherent.

I can't help but feel that Muramasa would have been better off if Vanillaware had embraced the brawler at the game's core and discarded the RPG elements (and Muso difficulty) entirely. The process of leveling up doesn't really add anything to the game, and the character development offers nothing for the player to do. Because the expanding life bar and experience screen notably interfere with other elements of the game, why not just get rid of them? Focusing the game on tactical combat, and the sword system on the selection of special attacks or abilities, would have made this a game about fighting smart rather than just about whacking things with a sword until you reach the next boss. Making Kisuke and Momohime play in noticeably different ways would also have made the game a more interesting experience.

Even those changes, though, would only somewhat ameliorate a fundamentally hollow experience. Muramasa: The Demon Blade reminds us of a famous swordsmith and his bloodthirsty blades, but the madness and viciousness thus evoked never really find their way into the gameplay or the thinly-presented story. Like its vast, fractured provinces, the various systems of the game never manage to form any coherent whole. Instead, the game comes across as a whole bunch of ideas thrown together willy-nilly and wrapped in as beautiful a package as possible. Muramasa has no secrets to reveal, no depths to plumb, no story to tell that equals its luxurious presentation. Like a ceremonial sword, it is glorious to behold, and better gazed upon than used.

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Muramasa goes to hell

Most of Muramasa: The Demon Blade is set in Japan, laid out on a map based on the provinces of its feudal period. In one act, however, the possessed princess Momohime jumps down a well in Kyoto (Yamashiro) and finds herself in a fiery underworld populated by demons. Although the game is suffused with elements from Japanese myth and folklore, this drop into a completely fantastic area represents a substantial break from the rest of the game's semi-historical motif. It represents a break in other ways as well, few of them good. Muramasa's episode in hell creates player frustration in almost every phase, to the detriment of one the game's most memorable sequences.

The stages set in hell involve a marked increase in difficulty. Most of the monsters encountered in this area are trivial little imps that have been seen all game and can be disposed of with a few strikes. Because they can launch projectile attacks if left alone, the best approach to deal with them is unbridled aggression. In the hell stages, however, these imps are accompanied by one or two hulking monsters that are very tough to kill. Not only do these oni take a great deal more damage, they also have an expanded arsenal of attacks that do significant damage to Momohime, and more importantly to her swords. Because a broken sword makes the player essentially incapable of offense or defense, these encounters can rapidly become very dangerous, and the player will spend much more time dodging attacks than is typical for a random encounter. Although the oni are vulnerable at every spot, fighting them requires a consideration for angle of attack and tactical retreat that goes beyond that needed for many of the game's bosses.

This is not an intrinsically bad thing, because the boss of this area, the Big Oni, also imposes tactical requirements that make it quite different from the preceding bosses in the game. It would have been clever to set the stage for this fight by making the oni enemies in the field have similar vulnerabilities and attacks to the big boss so that the player would be trained for the boss fight by the more ordinary encounters. Unfortunately, the oni from random encounters have only the slightest resemblance to the Big Oni in their attacks, and no similarities in vulnerability. So although they are in many ways much tougher to fight than the boss, the player takes nothing useful away from these encounters.

Irritatingly, the increased difficulty of these particular monsters does not seem to acknowledged in the experience yield from the battle. In Muramasa, the primary determinant of experience reward appears to be the monster level, which is in turn set by the player's level. This careless approach to the difficulty/reward dynamic is a characteristic flaw of Japanese RPGs, though not by any means confined to them. As Denis pointed out to me, the asymmetry between difficulty and reward appears in some Western RPGs as well. The foes introduced in Fallout 3's Broken Steel, for instance, give similar experience to their lower-level brethren, despite the steep increase in difficulty. At any rate, it's not unexpected to see this in Muramasa, though it is irritating, and it points to a larger issue I'll get into with my general critique later this week. Here, it merely accentuates the frustration of dealing with the more difficult enemies in the field, and helps turn the trip through hell, one of the least visually interesting areas in the game, into an annoying slog.

This means that the player arrives to the boss battle frustrated or even angry, which is a shame because the battle with the Big Oni is a really clever and interesting fight. The stage for combat is set by a pitch-perfect scene where Momohime convinces the Big Oni to swallow her whole, in classic trickster-hero style. The first phase of the battle then involves cutting your way out of the monster's belly, a classic epic trope that would in most other games have been played off as a cutscene. The main battle requires Momohime to attack the monster's horns, evoking the famous Japanese myth of Momotarō. Absent the cultural context, however, this resonance, and the accompanying hint about how to attack the Big Oni, are missing.

This again can easily become frustrating, because the target area on Big Oni is just large enough to be hit occasionally by attacking his body. Because every previous boss in the game is vulnerable at more or less every visible spot, the player might not even think this limitation on Big Oni is possible. Training the player to attack the horns with the randomly encountered oni would have been an ideal solution to this problem. Alternately, Vanillaware could have elected to have only the horns or head flash in response to damage, or to have shown the horns cracking and breaking as the battle progresses. However, the developers, being familiar with the myths about oni, simply might not have thought about how to convey that information to a Western audience. So, another possibility would be for the localization team to slip a hint into the dialogue boxes somewhere.

The journey into hell displays a set of outright mistakes and lost opportunities. Although the difficulty of this section is out of line with the rest of the game, the level of challenge is appropriate to the area being entered. However, because that challenge is not rewarded, what was merely tough becomes frustrating. The strategic requirements for dealing with the oni foes also break with the rest of the game, but it could have been used to prepare the player for a new wrinkle in the upcoming boss. Instead, the demons are dealt with using totally disjoint approaches: raw aggression for the smallest, careful dodging for their larger brethren, and targeted attack for the boss. That makes what could have been Muramasa's most striking and epic section into a frustrating and ultimately tedious slog.

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