Early this morning, I had the pleasure of attending a private appointment with Ignition Entertainment to check out their biggest and most anticipated Wii game of this year, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, an action-RPG set in feudal Japan developed by the team that made the PS2 classic, Odin Sphere. Eric Rodgers, Associate Producer at Ignition Entertainment, took me through a full demo of the first area for each of the game’s main characters, Momohime and Kisuke, along with a brief tutorial of how to play the game. Muramasa, thankfully in this case, features no motion controls and every action was done using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. The A button acted as the character’s basic attacks, B triggered their special attack, C acted as a weapon switch button and the control stick was used to move the character and to combo the attacks done with A and B.
The first area I played was the introduction level of Momohime’s story. Almost immediately, I noticed that the animation and backgrounds were extremely well animated and detailed, even more so than the team’s previous effort, Odin Sphere, and there was thankfully, in the demo I played, no slowdown which was easily the biggest gripe most gamers had with Odin Sphere. Treasure and hidden items are illuminated in the ground and souls, the power behind each of the character’s special attacks, are collected from enemies Momohime has defeated or that are scattered throughout the environment.
I also think it is worth noting that the game feels very different than its predecessor due to its emphasis on action instead of RPG elements. In fact, the game feels very similar to many old-school beat-up games (most notably The Legend of Kage) and menus are all clearly displayed on the top of the screen. The circular “Mana” menus from Odin Sphere have also been streamlined for Muramasa allowing the player to quickly breeze through fight after fight. That said, it seems the sheer amount of weapons that the player can acquire has not been minimized; the game will features upwards of 100 different weapons for Kisuke and Momohime.
Combat still relies heavily on a combo mechanic that rewards players for chaining move after move in a fight. Enemies ranging from everything to ninjas all the way to flying, furry eyeball monsters are all challenging and provide great fodder for the combo system exhibited within the game. Every aspect of the fighting feels fresh and the animation never ceases to amaze or hiccup throughout the various fights. Each character’s level also ended in enormous and gorgeous boss fights. During Momohime’s story, she attacks a huge blue monk Cyclops monster and in Kisuke’s story, the player will fight a rotund, demon-like shinobi. Both were extremely fun fights and the combat features so prevalent throughout the missions never got old.
On top of all this, I was assured by Rodgers that the game will take about 10 hours per character and has three difficulty modes, Muso (Easy), Shura (Medium) and an un-lockable hard mode in which the character will die in one hit. No to mention, the game will last much longer for players who really wish to find every weapon and item hidden within the game.
The map is another aspect that has been completely re-tooled in Muramasa and instead of the complicated “corner-of-the-TV” circular map from Odin Sphere, players will now follow linear paths to get form area to area. that said, in areas such as towns and villages, it seems that the player that still choose different paths to arrive at their goal if they so choose. It’s also worth noting that the game has not been, and will not be fully localized. Rodgers mentioned that while text and menus are all in English, the Japanese voice work will kept. This is due to the fact that they knew, no matter who they hired to do vocal work, players would complain about the “poor English vocal tracks”.
All in all, I came away from Muramasa: The Demon Blade extremely impressed by both the visual flair and the feeling of combat provided to player by the development team and the fine people at Ignition. Muramasa: The Demon Blade will be available in stores in mid-September 2009 exclusively on the Nintendo Wii.
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Wow Roger, super impressive article. Can’t wait to play the game myself.