Samurai Legend Musashi Impression

[Dracos]

Getting back into the swing of things...

Samurai Legend Musashi is the sequel to the playstation action RPG, Brave Fencer Musashi by Square.  This is written on the first hour or so of play, which gives a pretty decent spread of how they've changed it.

For one, they took a very interesting design plan: How can we take every element in the original game and cover it in shit.

Most of the gameplay is, technically, the same.  Technically.  Just minor elements all over that and general design scheme that's copletely off.

The game isn't a sequel really in a story sense.  It has absolutely nothing to do with the predecessor, simply coming across as a different telling as once again some random samurai named Musashi is summoned by a princess to save a kingdom from an evil empire.

I should slow down to the start though...

If you bought this in the store, you'd be given a pretty good warning.  The back of the box is pretty much yaoi fanart between the villian and the hero and I would be terribly shocked if tons of yaoi fanfiction didn't pop up around this series.

Getting it out and putting it in, it starts off with a cruddy animated sequence that pretty much solidifies that they're aiming at a young gaming crowd here.  Significantly younger than would've been around to play the original.

This is backed by the fact they found a six year old to voice Musashi's 'Are you all wight?" scantily clad samurai character with ten foot long hair.

On starting the game, they pretty much redo the start scene in fancier graphics and with different names from the first game.  Bad show, truly.  But then you're suddenly thrown into the woods with no transition where your unrevealed samurai has been undergoing training.  Why is the legendary hero undergoing training?  I don't know, but it was a pretty painful and slow mandatory tutorial to go over their basic moves.

Musashi is anything but elegant in motion, which is a real pity since he's less elegant in motion than the showing they gave last time on the playstation, which had the excuse of basic polygon graphics.  On top of being pretty slow moving and not interesting to move about, he's got this hugely long hair that follows him around, similar to the red scarf in Shinobi, but really does nothing interesting other than just take up a part of the screen since he's never moving fast at all.

The two mechanics that bear particular note at this point are the camera and the absorb skill setup.  In Brave Fencer Musashi you could charge up a magic sword and throw it at an enemy in order to attempt to copy their skill and absorb their power.  They decided, in their brilliance, to change that to having you charge up, walk up to the enemy, and have the hit you.  If you were lucky, you'd go into a special move and learn it.  Mostly this involved walking forward, getting hit, repeating.  Not fun.  The camera is also kind of pointless.  It has no intelligent automatic controls.  Sure, you can spin it around, but the lock on will only lock on if you're already facing the enemies.  Want to easily see what's going on behind you?  Run and turn around because there's no way to turn around quickly and deal with things behind you.

Now, this might be annoying if it wasn't for the fact that the enemies all suck.  In an hour of play, I killed over a hundred of the exact same type of enemy.  One of four that I encountered, including two bosses.  They had a grand total of two types of enemies that made up almost the entire straight line dungeon route from the disorienting training area to the first save point.  The level designs may as well include no turns since the whole thing is effectively a small path where you stab things and they respawn and you keep walking forward.

This really would be bad enough.  But they decided to break it up a bit.

Midway through 'level 1' they put a motorcycle, which you're forced to get on and ride.  Now, the idea of a samurai on a motorcycle is pretty bad to begin with... but then they add in stupid barriers, highly limited and boring controls, robot motorcycles... and well

Surfing music.

they put got damn surfing music in this scene.  It was just ew.

In the end, I regret every moment I spent playing it to get to the first save point and curse the gods that what should've been an easy awesome sequel was instead this poorly done crap.

Dracos

[Roku]

I only played a few minutes of the first one, so I wasn't as disappointed as you were.  It does have its flaws, but some of the later bosses are pretty good.  Except dark Musashi clone thing, that was just stupid.  It has surfing music because he eventually gets a flying surfboard.  Not a great game by any means, but not bad either imho.