A game where you chop stuff among games where you chop stuff.
It's not that this game is bad. It's fun to play for a while, but not nearly long enough. By the time you've beaten the second area, you have a gyst of what the rest of the game is going to be like. Chop through a couple new enemies( maybe ) and a lot of color swapped ones through a sword element specific location, get the maiden out of the big machine, carry her to point B without dying. It starts to get old. You even have to carry the warrior one to safety. This is irritating, but you get ove rit soon enough. The real problem and mainpoint of the game is the combat. Something is seriously wrong when a spiderman game as almost as much if not more replay value on the combat than a game about the greatest samurai that ever lived. All of the environments except the fire based one are actually very well designed as far as how it looks, but really all you get to do to respect the nice scenery is walk around and hit ninjas and robots in it with a limited moveset. The system for learning new attacks is kind of inventive. You hold R1 to lock on to 1 enemy and a bar starts to fill. When this bar fills you'll slightly more damage and when you get hit by an enemy you've never seen before, you'll have a chance to learn a new move. When you put in the command in the small amount of time you have to read and execute, you'll instantly be able to use that move. Around the beginning, this learning system works as there are a variety of moves to learn, but after that first level, for every single enemy all you have to do is hit circle and it will copy the technique and this system becomes worthless. A waste right? Past that, nearly every new move you learn is strong enough to completely destroy any new enemies you find. If you're only fighting 1 enemy, you won't even need to use this new move because when you attack, they can't do anything about it. They get stunned until you stop. Combat against almost every enemy is very easy except for when you're surrounded can be pretty unfair. You can get hit by one attack, get totally stunned for about a second and get attacked by some other enemy who was getting ready to attack you for about 3 seconds but you couldn't dodge because you got hit by someone else and got stunned.
Dying on this game is one of most irritating deaths I've ever played. It's very easy to die because the health bar is so nice looking you often don't think to look. There lots of items and accessories and such to get and you level up your katana 5 times. You'll get 5 elemental swords(and a default Oar) themed off of Musashi's real life book The Five Rings. Fire, Water, Air, Earth, and Void are the elements and they all have a special move to use, however none of them have any reason other than that move to use any other. Musashi's hair is a riot as it moves all over the place when he walks. You'll rescue a lot of people that you can buy a variety of items from and or use their services. Really though, nothing you get from these places actually feels like it makes a difference anywhere. Plus, it pushes cliches to a ridiculous point. Overall, the game isn't really worth getting and shames the legendary warrior Musashi. 7.5 out of 10.