E3 Impressions – Muramasa: The Demon Blade
By Jamie Love - June 11th, 2009
Muramasa is a painfully beautiful game – as in “so pretty it makes me hurt.” If the game were alive, I’d likely pace the floors for several hours before finally working up the courage to ask it to dance. Getting a date with the game at E3 was equally difficult, with the Wii-motes at the Ignition booth rarely left idle for long. I stole time to loiter near those screens whenever possibly during the week, watching streams of people become caught in the web of visual charm. Everyone seems to agree that the game is exquisite.
Yet it doesn’t serve the game to simply hang it on the wall and call it a work of art. I don’t believe we can use the labels of just “work” or “art” to describe what Vanillaware creates. Muramasa is certainly a labour however. One produced by a studio that symbolizes the word “craft” in the truest sense. No other developer has kept the 2nd dimension as vibrant and as full of life as Vanillaware has.
The background settings of Muramasa are a mixture of natural beauty and a strange sense of style resembling the painted backdrops of theater. Muramasa is very much the theater of videogames – a curtain should pull back each time it plays. Fields often resemble knitted blankets, while crashing waves leave me imagining stagehands struggling to keep pace while moving them behind the scenes.
This sets the stage for the focal point, the actors to appear and play their parts. Within the space of the foreground, Vanillaware’s signature style of movement plays out with the clashing of swords and the dramatic actions of bodies that leap through the air to stand off of the background. There are no Wii-mote tricks involved, this is the stylized hack and slash you can sink your teeth into.
There’s something I’ve never quite put my finger on at work here. Action is controlled, in the sense that an exclamation appears prior to enemy encounters – a beacon warning that the play is about to begin. Between those encounters, the player moves at their leisure over top of the canvas, giving the entire work a pulse that shows more significance when the two elements met rather than when we simply appreciate a still image.
What remains is a game perhaps caught between two worlds, inviting the player to cut a path of meaning by playing the game via two different styles as well as with two different characters. I’m certainly not done chewing on these ideas, so for now it’s safe to say I’m eagerly awaiting the final release.
See More Images and Art for Muramasa: The Demon Blade »
