Platform:
PlayStation 5, Switch, PC
Publisher:
XSEED Games, Marvelous Games
Developer:
Vanillaware
Release:
Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a Nintendo Wii exclusive and a beloved title among fans of developer Vanillaware, later enhanced with a PlayStation Vita remaster in Muramasa Rebirth in 2013. Rebirth also brought Genroku Legends, a standalone DLC with new stories and playable characters to the game’s gorgeous, painterly side-scrolling action. In a touch of painful irony, Rebirth has remained locked to the Vita, just as The Demon Blade was to the Wii before. Finally, though, Vanillaware is teaming up with publisher Marvelous to bring all of Muramasa’s history to modern consoles.
Dubbed Muramasa: Revenant Blades, this 4K remaster combines Rebirth and its Genroku Legends DLC into one cohesive package – you can lay that Wii and dusty Vita to rest now. I played roughly an hour of it in a quiet Marvelous office space in Tokyo’s Shinagawa district, and have been staring at my Switch 2 ever since, doing my best to manifest its immediate existence on the console. I haven’t touched the Muramasa series in well over a decade, but I didn’t miss a beat, slicing my way through the game’s first two acts on the Moral (see: hard) difficulty. It was tough, but that challenge only pushed me to pay even closer attention to what I was doing in this classic Vanillaware action-platformer beat ‘em up. I already can’t wait for more.
Muramasa has always been a looker of a series, but in this renewed 4K presentation, completely redrawn by Vanillaware’s artists, it is especially beautiful. Set during Japan’s Edo period, under the reign of shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (who was in office from 1680 to 1709), it features the feudal Japanese visuals you’re imagining. But Muramasa mixes Japanese folklore, demons, and more to give Vanillaware’s trademark art some fantastical substance. As you move from left to right, or right to left, or up and down, or some combination of these directions, parsing through different screens within a given level, massive mountains hover in the background; trees bend and rotate as you walk through the forest, giving way to a labyrinthine vibe that protagonist Kisuke is likely also feeling; Machiya-style houses stack atop and beside Nagaya homes in cities, creating an endless puzzle of buildings you can enter to search or fight outside.
Combat remains as fun as always. Though it plays like a beat ‘em up, you use swords, so the result is a frenetic hack-and-slash experience that’s easy to understand, with plenty of depth to master. This Revenant Blades package promises over 100 swords to forge and dozens of skills to upgrade and master for your kit. Upgraded controls make all of it feel better to play, too, and the resulting combat reminds me of 2D fighters as I juggle ninjas and samurai in the air, countering their counters, and clashing blades to ensure I’m not hit – it’s intense, requiring all my focus to not die.
My learnings are put to the test against the two bosses I face in my hour-long preview: Kurozaru, a hulking menace that’s fast and uses shurikens and AOE attacks to stop me from getting too close for too long, and some giant centipedes, which crawl around the entire level and require me to slash away at different bits of their bodies to finally kill them.
There’s plenty more in the game I don’t get to see, like the other five stories to play through, each with new localization and English voiceover, additional skills and katanas to unlock, and the ways unseen parts look in this 4K remaster. But what I did get to see and play is enough to ensure I’ll be working my way through the rest next year. Until then, I’ll keep staring at my Switch 2.
