Musashi: Samurai Legend And How Unbalanced Traditional Progression Can Gatekeep A Great Action Title
Musashi: Samurai Legend is a 2005 PlayStation 2 sequel to Brave Fencer Musashi. The game combines traditional hack and slash combat with a special move system that allows you to learn skills from enemies by countering them, Musashi also has a game play mechanic that has you carry certain characters around with you while making your way through puzzles and enemy hordes. You play as Musashi, a young samurai that has been summoned to another world to help a city of mystics fight back against an evil samurai named Gandrake who means to use the worlds natural resources and magics to power an ancient machine found underground. I can’t recommend that anyone play this game, it’s a slow and clunky game with horrible voice acting and terrible boss design that makes progress a chore. However for the people that do anyway, you’ll find that there is something really special here if you are patient enough to play Musashi: Samurai Legend.
When I found this game I immediately bought it off the shelf after noticing that the art was unmistakably the work of popular video game concept artist Tetsuya Nomura who is responsible for several Final Fantasy titles, Kingdom Hearts, and The World Ends With You. The game emulates his style in the 3D space really well. Of course if you wanted to see a better representation of Nomura’s work I would point you at any of the other aforementioned games, however if you are like me who has exhausted those other titles this can feel like opening some more of his drawing pads. Unfortunately that is where the artistry in this game ends, both the writing and voice acting is painful to sit through and if it weren’t just to understand some more of the games excellent world building I would have skipped every cutscene. The environment art in itself is really well done, objects and scenery pop and the wide array of biomes to explore give the player a lot to look at. But reused assets and repetitive architecture and dungeon design tear down the experience.
In the beginning of this game I was dissuaded from playing because of the lack of game mechanics provided early on. Eventually you unlock a wide variety of offensive and defensive moves but if you have played other action games, the first few levels will feel unfair. Without evasion the enemies move sets and spawn locations can create frustrating scenarios making rooms of enemies early in the game deadly.
The games boss design is about distance from the enemy and positioning, you decide when there is an opening and strike. With few ways to close the gap between you and the boss or ways to position behind the boss, a lot of the time finding openings to strike can cost you upwards of 10–15 tries at a boss fight to find out when to strike and how to bait out those opportunities. And to think about a boss as a type of puzzle, facing these behemoths in the first third of the game is a disaster. Each boss in the first two chapters offer very little in the way of telegraph so in a game where you are supposed to space and examine a move, you are often presented with scenarios that require you to rush in and trial and error approaches that will cost you either a reset or most of your consumable items.
Speaking of consumable items, the first store that you unlock is the bread shop which is the most expensive shop. This barricades you from taking advantage of the games most useful mechanic which is preparing for encounters with healing items. The hub area is also where my issues with the game were. The entire hub reminds me of an empty MMO server (even when you’ve rescued everyone) and most of the time I had to walk around with my map out because I could not tell where anything was as the hub looks the same all around and has no landmarks except a huge hole in the ceiling. In the hub you can also be barred from progress in the game if you haven’t saved the NPC that has the next quest, this is fine except for the fact that you are not told this sometimes and are left to wander around wondering what it is you need to do to advance the story.
The first 6 hours of this game turn into a miserable slog through unfair boss encounters and the Roquefort Mines dungeon that copies and pastes rooms and enemy spawns almost shamelessly. To go into this a little more, the mines in this game are an area that take a lot of time to go through not only because they force you to go there about 4 times, but also because many of the corridors are actually the exact same, sometimes back to back, that feature enemies that mostly respawn infinitely.
I had thought that the Roquefort Mines section of the game had completely deterred me from this game. I took about 4 or 5 days to not think about Musashi and possibly I had given up. But I looked up a guide started in 2005 by DomZ Ninja and came back to finish it out, and I’m glad that I did. Once the game provides the player with healing items it is a straight shot to the end, once I had gone back to save the villagers and unlocked a lot of the stores in antheum the game became a walk in the park. I still felt like I occasionally needed a guide to find certain bosses weak spots but with the health advantage I almost never died past this point.
The last 4 areas that I went to in the game were incredibly deep with fun secret areas and diverse layouts that almost never repeated save a few exceptions. Interesting enemies were revealed that required me to change my strategy in hand to hand and I felt now that I had real options when overwhelmed by enemies and was more open to taking risks with more consumable items to pad out the level. I found that at last I was having fun playing the game and exploring the Zelda-esque levels that finally started to show their inspiration. And at the end of the experience, I found a satisfying ending with very anime twists, a fun and engaging boss rush of the enemy characters that have had a full game to develop fun personalities, and a final confrontation that pulled the games counter system into the final spotlight.
Musashi: Samurai Legend is a victim to its own pacing, a game that gave you too little to begin and too much in the end. It felt like a game in which you level up and the game doesn’t. If you are wondering if it is worth dragging yourself through the opening hours of this game I can quickly say no, it’s not. You would most likely give up and I don’t blame you, the ending is charming and full of redemption but not enough to make up for the games shortcomings. The developers implemented so much progression and did not create a world that necessarily needed it. I would love to see a Musashi game that did away with leveling and let you access all of the systems and play the game how the developers intended from the beginning, but I won’t keep my hopes up. Musashi unfortunately came way too late, we already had Kingdom Hearts and this game failed to provide an action experience that built on what Square Enix had done in the past, so for now it will remain in eBay bids and on the shelves of collector’s that adore Square Enix games (as much as I do).
One more shout out for DomZ Ninja for making a guide for this game. Also big thank you to anyone that makes guides for video games because that is a monumental amount of work.
