It’s been six years in the making, but Musashi finally has a sequel. The original game (which we jokingly refer to as the free game that came with the Final Fantasy VIII demo) gained cult status alongside other games like Einhander that were released by Squaresoft (as they were known then) in the late 90’s. After spending about twelve hours with Musashi Samurai Legend, I’m honestly a little disappointed. Under the excellent visual style and suave character designs, Samurai Legend turns out to be a vaguely exciting lesson in repetition. The sequel is pretty much a retelling of the original game, for those who are familiar with the series. The game opens with a town, atop a giant flying whale no doubt, under attack by an evil corporation called Gandrake Enterprises. With the town being overrun, Princess Mycella attempts to summon a hero from another world which she achieves in the nick of time; being that she is captured as she completes the spell. Gandrake is after the mystics of the town to fuel the Nebulium Engine, a device that has spawned a revolution towards an easier life for people all over the world. Now with the town in peril and the flying whale out of energy, Musashi has to fetch four maidens, who all have a tendency to wander off into the gaping mouth of danger and captivity, as well as their elemental swords. It all builds towards ultimately rescuing the townspeople trapped in orbs, rebuilding the town, rescuing Mycella, and getting back home. Your base of operations is the town of Antheum. At first, it’s not much to look at, but as you go through missions you’ll come across blue orbs where you can rescue the merchants and townspeople. The town has all of the RPG essentials, you can buy bread to gain health at the Bakery, buy armor at the emporium, talk to a psychic to find missing townspeople, get your weapons tempered at the blacksmith, or get virtually unlimited money battling at the arena. Musashi will explore various locales such as forests, mines, and active volcanoes just to name a few. Each level is well designed, though you’ll be doing your fair share of backtracking through them. You’ll find yourself visiting the mining level about three times during the game. Levels also have a habit of repeating the same looking hallways and paths from time to time, so you could occasionally find yourself double checking whether you’re going forwards or backwards in the level. Luckily, there aren’t many branching paths as levels are fairly linear. Levels manage to get pretty expansive, but you’ll only get an occasional check point or two on your way to fighting the boss. If you want to save progress on that level where you gained two levels and three new abilities, you’ll either have to fight to the boss or head back to the beginning to teleport back to town. You’re guided by a mini map display in the lower right hand corner. You can hit R2 to blow it up and get some perspective. You’ll also see a glowing star that tells you where you need to go to get the storyline going further, which is a very nice touch. The missions you’ll go on are pretty cut and dry, whereas you’ll have to use a new ability to get past the puzzles the levels throw at you, mow through the baddies, fight a boss, get the maiden who always ends up fainting, and carry her back to the town teleporter. Throughout the journey you’ll find yourself fighting some pretty neat and well designed baddies. They range from masked ninjas with claws to giant robots. Sadly, by the time you reach the end of chapter two you’ve pretty much seen them all. They’ll get more difficult as you press on, but the only difference between the enemies of the later levels and the earlier ones are that the later levels are full of mere palette swaps. Boss battles are fairly frequent and pretty satisfying to boot. You’ll go up against bosses that represent each of the four elements, like a kraken to represent water and a…crab for earth. Well, maybe not totally accurate representations, but if you want to get technical, then so be it. Enemy AI is essentially non existent, as they tend to charge right at you when you grab their attention. When in numbers, they’ll surround you while taking turns to attack. The bosses aren’t overly difficult and can be easily dispatched in one to three attempts. There’s no need to worry about getting killed by the boss, since the game will let you continue from the beginning of the battle. One of the game’s glaring disappointments is the way Musashi plays. He looks like he could hang with the likes of Dante or Strider, but ends up being about the same speed as a Mario. For those who didn’t catch the metaphor, it means the gameplay isn’t too fast paced. Musashi comes equipped with his trusty katana as well as a number of larger weapons to make sure baddies are put down for good. You’ll start off with a basic giant oar before collecting the elemental swords. Each sword has its own special attacks based off of the element of the sword. You’ll have various combo attacks that will give out three quick hits or four quick hits with a slow and powerful finisher from one of the element swords. The problem here is that Musashi always attacks in combos, so if you’re surrounded, you’re almost guaranteed that you’ll get hit while Musashi is finishing up the combo long after one of the enemies is slain. You’re totally unable to cancel the combo with a jump or dash, which doesn’t help much during boss battles when you want to get in a quick attack and jump away. This is a big drawback since you’re basically using the same combos throughout the whole game. You’re also able to attack while carrying random objects and maidens around, which you’ll be doing often. You can either thrust the maiden / object at enemies to knock them down and cause some major damage, or you can opt to throw them in the air and perform a circular slash before catching them. This adds a little spice to the redundant fighting and looks pretty cool in the process…where else can you attack evil corporate goons with a passed out maiden? What adds to the repetition is that enemies respawn quickly. You’ll find yourself clearing the room of enemies and looking around to explore only to have another set of baddies respawn behind you and hold you up. It’s great for experience points and money, but bad on patience. The camera is also a chore to control since it randomly likes to swing around to the front of you and hide any oncoming enemies. It's also inverted, so you'll take some time getting used to hitting left to make the camera go right and so on. During your missions, you'll also come across random vehicles, such as a motorcycle or some crazy robotic toy airplane, that trigger small mini games that have you speeding down tunnels taking out as many baddies as you can for points and prizes. These are pretty fun, yet easy to play. The upside to the somewhat shallow fighting system is the ability to focus on your opponents and learn abilities from them. For every new enemy type you face, you can focus on them until they perform their special attack on you. Timing is important since a marker will pop up and you’ll have to hit the square button as soon as you see it. From that point, you have a limited amount of time to hit a button (depending on whether it’s a defensive or offensive attack) to successfully learn the move. You’ll most likely only find a couple of favorites out of these new abilities, as most of them don’t have much use, however they all look pretty cool when executed. This can get a tad annoying since you’ll end up getting smacked a few times in the process of gaining these abilities since the special attacks seem to come up at random moments. If there’s a highlight to Samurai Legend, it’s definitely the visuals. The game uses an art style that’s a combination of cel shading accented with shading used in Manga. Though the characters’ oversized hands look a bit odd, the visual style is beautiful. Characters all look good, no matter whom they are and have great designs to them. The same can be said for the environments which are all well detailed and colorful. Battle effects are well done with plenty of blurring effects and particles flying about, not to mention the satisfying way enemies disintegrate like the vampires in a Blade movie. Some levels tend to feel a little claustrophobic since trees and easily reachable platforms act as walls to fence you in. You will notice some drops in the frame rate when there are a lot of enemies onscreen, like in the arena for instance. Sound is a mixed bag. One issue worth mentioning is the horrific voice acting. All of the characters sound awkward when delivering their lines. Musashi speaks with such dimwittedness that I halfway expect him to start saying “Where did he go, George?” at any given moment. You will get some neat battle noises, however, along with that anime slashing noise that I love so much. The game's score is nice, especially the crazy surf rock that plays during some of the vehicle portions of the game. Musashi Samurai Legend is a solid action RPG, but it comes nowhere near the greatness of Dark Cloud 2 in terms of gameplay and overall production. Casual gamers and fans of the series will most likely have a good time with this one, but with game time clocking in at around ten hours, it might be worth a rental first. Hopefully, Square-Enix won’t retire the series all together over one small blemish on the name of the series. Like a beautiful woman, Musashi Samurai Legend has the looks, but little to offer under the hood.
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