Musashi: Samurai Legend reviewed

In 1998, a little game called Brave Fencer Musashi was released but it was overshadowed by the fact that it was packaged with the Final Fantasy VIII demo...you know, back when we didn't know how crappy it would be. I couldn't even beat the demo...anyways, Brave Fencer was a nice, fun game. I didn't beat it but that's cause my brother went to college and took the Playstation with him...mostly cause it was his. So many years later I was at Gamestop and I saw the subject's of today's review. It was new and only $10 so I bought it, hoping that this will be as good as Brave Fencer and it wasn't.

So the evil Gandrake Corporation is attacking Anthedeum, a village on a flying whale...I wish I made that up. So the princess of Anthedeum gets kidnapped but before she does, she summons our hero...but since she can't concentrate due to her being kidnapped or just cause she's a woman, he arrives at the wrong place and unconscious. Then this Asian cat with an eye-patch named Mew finds you and trains in the art of the game...I mean samurai and I also wish I made that part up. Eventually you arrive on the whale village and you are now tasked with finding the five maidens and getting their swords so you can be powerful enough to save the princess and destroy the Gandrake corporation.

So why does this game suck, let's find out. The main problem is that the game is unable to multitask. So you're doing a chain attack and you need to defend, well you can't and you'll probably get hurt. But what's this? You shouldn't be able to do that anyways. Well you may be right but here's something else! You're in a massive battle, you're low on health and you need to pause the game so you can get a healing item. Well you need to stand perfectly still to activate the pause menu...which you can't do since you're getting your ass beaten and then die horribly. Which leads me to my other complaint, there's only one place you can save, which is in Musashi's own room at the flying whale village! What is this, the 90's! And the missions are pretty long so if you die, you have to start all over unless you're lucky enough to get a checkpoint but you can't save on them. Then you have to carry the maidens every time you find them, but for a logical reason cause you just rescued them from some sort of cage so they can't really walk but it happens so often it's kinda annoying. Then, in an optional side quest late in the game, you have to carry the Earth Maiden to get mushrooms. The Earth Maiden who can walk and stand on her power! The Earth Maiden who is capable of picking up her damn mushrooms and you have to carry her! I think this game might be sexist. And the graphics bring horrible pain to the eyes. It's stylized to look like a manga but it's not drawn well at all. Think of the cel-shading from Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker but degrade it a 100 times.

Then there's the voice acting, all but two characters are either painfully wooden or wonderfully over-the-top. So who are these two exceptions, why Mew and Musashi. First off Mew, that has both horrible writing and horrible voice acting to make the portrayal racist to both Asian and cats. It's like your typical Miyagi role but with all the transitional words cut out so it's like "You done well student!". Then he has this verbal tic of going Neow which is a combination of meow and now but why? Why couldn't the game just use Meow if they were going with the cat theme, it would've been clever and just racist to Asians. As for Musashi, you know how some punk kids deepen their voice to be more adult. Yep, it happens here and combined with the voice actress(yes, a chick voiced Musashi) inability to act is a combination that brings horrible pain of the ears.

Now I've been harsh to this game so it may surprise you that there are some good things in the game. The gameplay itself isn't too boring and it does try something new with duplicating techniques. Granted, it does drop the ball with them being irrelevant and 90% of them costing you MP and just have you pressing the circle button. Also, when you're driving something there's a catchy surf theme that plays and it's kinda fun music. And that's pretty much it of the good things in the game.

So this game pretty much suffers from extreme Sequel-itis from the superior Brave Fencer Musashi in pretty much every category. Sure the gameplay isn't too bad but when everything else is this flawed, you better re-invent the wheel to make us forget how bad it is. They didn't, instead we have a germ of a good game then can fill a need for undiscriminating players who don't know any better.

3/10