Muramasa: The Demon Blade impressions

So I've actually re-connected my Wii to my TV and turned in on for 3 days in a row now because Muramasa is kind of awesome. And kind of hard. The art style is spectacular. The sprites and backgrounds are all hand drawn and don't look like ass on an HDTV.

The art may look simple at first, but when you see it in motion and realize that there are several layers to each background, you begin to appreciate what the developers did. The combat is pretty simple on the surface too. It's all 1-button combat, and if you hold the A button down you can do special dash attacks. Your character can hold up to three different blades a one time and each blade has a different attack power and special attack. There are several different enemies you will randomly encounter while traversing the Metroid style rooms.

Another thing it has in common with Metroid is that different portions of each area can only be accessed after you get a certain sword that can destroy the barrier. The boss fights are completely old school and feature you learning the pattern of the boss and exploiting it to win. Some of them are downright frustrating, especially when you have a boss that can hover above you and randomly drop high damage attacks down on you. Also, even with over 1/3 of the swords owned and me being at a higher level than what the game is pacing me at, I'm never more than one bad encounter away from dying. This game is hard. If you land somewhere between two enemies at the wrong time they can hit you for a lot of damage fast. It's like Ninja Gaiden in that aspect where even the lowliest of enemies can kill you if you don't watch what your doing.

The story so far (of the one I'm playing apparently there's an alternate story path I have yet to start) is that some super badass samurai guy was dying and used some hidden technique to steal some girl's body to continue his quest to kill someone. It's very Japanese and the original voice language track is in tact with English subtitles all the way through. It's a very pretty game and it's really fun if you can get over the fact that you will die more often than you'd like (there are 2 difficulty settings one where you have to defend yourself and one where you don't and they can be changed on the fly - I'm playing it on the harder one). The death penalty isn't all that bad either. You usually just spawn one or two screens away from where you were at the worst. They also don't make you have to go through the whole "this is why I'm here to kill you..." business if you die and have to restart a boss fight either. Muramasa is definitely a Wii game that's worth it.