Musashi: Samurai Legend

"History Doesn't repeat itself!"

I had high hopes for this game. I loved the original game back on the PSX and have been following this game since last year. It was easily one of my most anticipated game of, not only this quarter, but the year. What I came away with instead was a feeling that my energy could have been spent elsewhere. There are a ton of problems with this game, and most aren't technical.

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Game Play
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I usually don't start with this when reviewing a game, I like to put the bad first then dwell on the good. I have made an exception in this case. This is your basic hack and slash adventure game. You swing your sword until you level up, then you power up, then you swing your sword some more. That is what I expected for this game, but I had hoped that it would have, at least, a little innovation. No, however, this is just a run of the mill game. The "Fusion" sword technique from the first game has been replaced with a "Duplicate" technique. It is basically the same thing save for how you implement it. In Brave Fencer Musashi you would power up your sword and fling it at an enemy, then jam on the square button repeatedly until you filled up the bar. The sword would then fly back to you with the newly acquired attack. In this game, however, you have to lock onto an enemy and wait for the bar to fill up, so far so good. Here is where it gets annoying, you then have to wait for the enemy to attack you and as soon as he does you attack. If done right, I beat the game twice and still haven't gotten the timing to a respectable margin, you will gain an attack from the enemy. This skill is pretty useless for how hard it is to master. It doesn't offer anything more to the game that your attack chain won't produce for you. The rest of the game play is pretty, "blah"! Nothing special here. The camera is another annoying aspect of this game. Often times you won't be able to see ahead of you, rather the camera will be above you aiming down. That's great, I know what my character looks like, where are the enemies? This game also suffers from some slow down, not much, just enough to be noticeably annoying.

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Story
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Again nothing special here. Generic, "Princess gets captured. Go rescue her." A sad note is that Square changed Musashi's attitude from the first game. Gone is the lazy anti-hero from the past and is replaced with a "goody-two-shoes" character with a "go-get'em" attitude. That's okay, but it's not what Musashi is. I wanted to hear more of the original Musashi's "Do I have to?" attitude. Also, Musashi has probably the worst voice in American video game existence. Yes, even worse than Barry Burton from Resident Evil. I am not one for main characters who just stand there the whole game and never say a word, but I would have made an exception for this character. It is a pain to listen to Musashi.

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Control
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The game uses two buttons to attack and has a jump button, other than that, nothing really. You use the square button until all of your enemies are dead. You could use your triangle sword attack, but it's slowness makes it useless. Also, in the beginning of the game when you get your five attack chain you should still only rely on the basic three attack. Musashi doesn't move fast enough to get out of the way of an enemy attack during the fourth and fifth hit.

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Presentation/Graphics
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This game has a very distinct style to it that bleeds through everything that you interact with. It's art style is unique. It has anime cutscenes and an okay anime opening. The only real problem I had here was that their hands were ginormous. You could fit two of the characters heads into any one hand. Scary!

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So what does it all mean?
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Well, this is definitely a game worth only a rental. The control and game play problems don't warrant a full price purchase. If you are a fan of Square-Enix you probably already own it, but if not, don't buy it. On the other hand if you absolutely have to have a Square-Enix game I would suggest Full Metal Alchemist. It has almost the same art style and is more fun to play than Musashi: Samurai Legend.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 05/19/05