Muramasa: The Demon Blade

I'm pretty sure that Muramasa is a great game. I certainly know it's one of the most beautiful I've ever played. Basically, no discussion of this game can pass without a discussion of its outrageous visuals. Except for text and menus, every single bit of this game is hand painted. As you can see above, this makes every single frame of the game look like a gorgeous painting. The smooth animation gives the game a sheen of elegance.

You have the option at the start of the game to play as Kisuke, a ninja who has lost his memory, or Momohime, a princess who's had her soul stolen. This is a nice touch, as it gives the game a very different feel when you play as the other character. I found it a little bit odd that Kisuke starts with 140 hit points (or "Life flame" as the games calls it) and Momohime starts with 138, but the difference in terms of actual gameplay is negligible. The game takes place in medieval Japan and is set across a huge, diverse landscape – rolling hills give way to snowy mountains, cherry blossom-tipped trees give way to wood-cut painting inspired beaches. While you might really enjoy the combat in the game, the real reason I kept playing was to see what was around the next corner in terms of background visuals.

The story of the game is a little hard to follow. It's tough to tell whether it's a case of poor translation, the use of quite a bit of proper names, or a really dense integration with Japanese folklore, but it's a very rich story nonetheless. I think that, after playing through Kisuke's storyline, I was more in line with the game's dialog and found it easier to follow. I think that basically what I got out of it is that the denial of traditional Japanese folkloric spirits and monsters has led to a downfall of its culture, but there's also demon samurai who become your allies, monks possessed by demon blades, and more kind of crazy stuff. It would have been nice to have given a non-Japanese audience a bit more context for the mythology of the game world, but of course that's not a necessity for a game that was fully developed with Japanese audiences in mind. As well, retaining the Japanese voice acting was a stroke of brilliance, almost making the game seem entirely like the videogame equivalent of a foreign film.

And despite the fact that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a Taiwanese film and featured an entirely different strain of martial arts, Muramasa feels like its Japanese, videogame counterpart. While the soundtrack does change from really beautiful and haunting melodies when you're just exploring to kind of obnoxious "hard-hitting action" music during the battles, the game retains a kind of elegance in its battle system that is reflected throughout the entire game. Controlling your character is exactly the same as controlling Marth or Ike in Super Smash Brothers, so if you're up to speed with that, then you're ready to go in this game. Your character controls extremely tightly, and within minutes you'll be able to pull off really great combos. My girlfriend was able to do quite a bit of damage in the game button mashing, and I will admit that button mashing can get you some ways in the game. This could be seen as a bit of a downfall, but doing the "proper" moves in the game does look really cool, so there's that trade-off. There's no motion control in this game – you can use the Wii remote and nunchuk, the Classic Controller, or a Gamecube controller – but I can't see how that would work anyways.

If there's any drawback to this game, it's that, despite the cooking system (which is really fun), the RPG elements, and the blade forging, this game is essentially a really, really beautiful Super Nintendo game. Not that there's anything wrong with that – hell, I basically made the same argument in my New Super Mario Bros. Wii review, and that didn't bother me either. If you can still play Super Metroid or Castlevania and enjoy them (and not wish they were updated into 3D, even though they both have been), you're going to love Muramasa. It would be, without a doubt, one of the best Super Nintendo games ever made. And that's more than good enough for me, making it one of the best games I've played this year.