Definitely up there as a contender for the greatest second game in a series.

This game is masterful work. Maybe my favorite Valve game, unless that Half-Life 2 replay really hits. This game fails at nothing. Every level, every puzzle, every area, every character accompanied by their sharp, witty writing and iconic performances is nothing less than top-tier. THIS is how you make a single-player puzzle/platformer, ladies and gentlemen. It's crazy that this game is over 10 years old because it feels so fresh despite it all. Portal 2 in 2024 still feels as in touch and supreme in the gaming sphere as it did in 2011. I can do nothing but praise this game.

An excellent JRPG that pretty much exceeds at just about everything it sets out to do. The characters are charming and memorable, and the world is truly one of the best to grace the genre with stunning maps and art direction that is just mesmerizing front to back. The combat is great and easy to jump into, while being deeply rewarding at the same time to learn all of its complexities. All of that, and the cherry on top being an amazing score assembled by so many GOATs within the medium.

What holds the game back, unfortunately, is everything outside main content. The game is stuffed with so much meandering, dreadful side content. It wouldn't be so bad if it was TRULY optional, but the game has some difficulty spikes that are nigh impossible to overcome unless you've leveled up from mindlessly doing these, as well being locked out from endgame-tier skills and equipment. Also, while I enjoy most party members, there are some that are just kind of terrible. Some, just because, and some because the AI for them sucks (cough Shulk cough Melia)

There's just things about XC that don't completely mesh with me, but stomach the few setbacks and you have a truly exceptional JRPG experience.

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa : The Law of Unbalance

Mid
Kino
Abyss
Peak
Disasterpiece
Masterpiece
Kusoge
Kamige

The Law of Balance.

One man’s trash is another one’s treasure, in the infinite sea of contents constantly bombarded at us in the information age, few of them are able to stand out amongst the crowd. For better or for worse, some of them do manage to find their ways in the hands of niche communities which hails them as holy texts, sacred masterpieces that the common man simply couldn’t fathom looking at through a simple, unthinking, uncritical lens. Without necessarily attaining mainstream appeal some works are able to just change people so profoundly and impact their genre in such a way that it’s impossible to miss them if you dive deeper into certain corners of the cultural zeitgeist.

If like me, you happened to be one of the few people in the west to be interested in the phenomenon known as “Visual Novel” (a term I’m not particularly comfortable using as a descriptor for various reasons unrelated to this review), there are seminal classics that have made a name for themselves and one of them is the game we’re going to talk about today : Full Metal Daemon Muramasa !

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is a game developed by Nitroplus in 2009 and written by the quite mysterious Ittetsu Narahara. The reason why I’m saying this is because the guy isn’t really known for being a visual novel writer let alone an artist, initially the guy was a kendo instructor who just so happened to find work at Nitroplus. Not much is known about the guy itself, I’ve tried looking him up online and only these few informations and the fact he worked previously on another game by the name of “Hanachirasu” (which I have not read and therefore won’t discuss in this review) that he created in order to “train” himself in the art of writing fiction. Both Hanachirasu and Full Metal Daemon Muramasa were works that were quite polarizing in their home countries and Narahara himself received many criticism towards his work but to what nature I couldn’t really tell through my research.

After finishing his work on Muramasa, Ittetsu Narahara would simply vanish into the either never to be seen again, the last time he made any sort of public statement was in 2019 as Muramasa was celebrating its 10th anniversary. He stated that he was not looking to work on more games and formally announced his departure from Nitroplus that year. While the man himself is quite mysterious, it is not a surprise that he ended up choosing Nitroplus to work on his game or perhaps Nitroplus chose him, again I’m not really sure.

Nitroplus is known for their catalog of dark and edgy titles, often depicting scenes of extreme physical, psychological and quite unfortunately sexual violence.
I’m going to be perfectly honest and it’s going to be apparent throughout this review, I’m not a huge fan of Nitroplus’s outing and it’s not for a lack of trying : From Saya no Uta to Demonbane to Totono or heck even their less extreme outing like Chaos;Head (which I have yet to finish), a lot of them initially clicked with me from the outside but the more I digged into them and the less I found their conceptual appeal to carry over many substance. It’s also not helped that Nitroplus’s way of handling dark subject matters tend to be pretty juvenile and dare I’d say immature. One of their favorite past-time is adding unnecessary rape scene to pretty much any of their works, all of these have seemingly the same goal : to enhance the dark atmosphere of their narratives and hammer down how dire and fucked up their setting is. But ultimately, I think there’s a point where not only do I think it’s “too much”, there’s also a point where it can feel somewhat misogynistic as any female is often treated as an available hole to be used by men and it’s not like Nitroplus ever actually comments or show the consequences of these terrible acts on the psyche of the victims, it’s all very fetishized and disgusting and yes, even Muramasa isn’t a stranger to that excessive amount of edge.

And before people call me a hypocrite for criticizing that aspect, I think I need to make my position clear on the subject before moving on to actually talking about the game. To me depiction of sexual violence and fucked up fetishes isn’t really an issue, after all I am an advocate for freedom of expression and I think every work no matter how agreeable they can be can have some value merely by existing and adding their own bricks to the foundation of culture as a whole. If we simply couldn’t represent or brought these topics up, ever, we would be no better than the people perpetrating these action in the first place because while Nitroplus work could be seen as pieces of art which normalize rape, completely erasing any and all sorts of representation regardless of relevance even the most graphic one would also simply be just as hypocritical as pretending these actions don’t exist in the first place. As bad as it is, these inhumane actions are a part of the human experience and as we’ll see down the line, Muramasa touches on the subject of morality and stuff so it’s not like that type of content doesn’t have its place inside a work like this.

But the thing is that eroge companies operate on the logic that they’re always and I mean always selling their products to people who buys them primordially for the erotic content and thus, one can imagine that the primordial core reason why these scenes exists in the first place is to titillate the senses of those who came for it. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that, consumption of porn could be looked under a moral lens but in the specific case of eroge where the only people hurt in the process are a bunch of underpaid developers and translators I don’t think it’s all that necessary and who doesn’t love to jacking in in San Diego from time to time and find outlets to do so, it’s a natural desire and the porn you consume is only between you and god. In the end, it’s really a matter of representation and execution, in my review of Dohna Dohna, an AliceSoft game which historically had a huge propension for rapey content and “problematic” representation of sex, I stated that to me at least, it’s all a matter of framing ! I like sexy women (or men, let's be not exclusive here) being railed in all sorts of fashion for sure, but I also like when genuine thoughts are put behind it as I tend to have a fetish for narrative consistency more than I actually like sex.

AliceSoft games are designed with a lot of intent behind them, there’s a transparency on what type of games you’re playing as well as clear tone indicators on when you’re supposed to take a situation presented to you seriously or with several degrees of levity but in the end, the game also makes damn sure to remind you that you are in fact playing a porn game.

To compare with a Nitroplus game, Demonbane is a visual novel I read primordially to experience a silly light-hearted super robot adventure about heroes fighting evil creatures in the name of justice, love and all that’s good, it’s openly silly and deliberate in its tone and its inspirations. But why the fuck do I need to sit through so many random and terribly misplaced H-Scenes which completely kills the mood and at times pacing of everything. I just want to see cool robot fighting, why does the sex and most importantly, the rape has to be there ! And I mean yeah, there’s an argument to be made that Demonbane is based on Lovecraftian mythology and features heavy references to the works of the H.P himself which were dark stories featuring sex cult and stuff but Demonbane executes this without grace or any sort of subtlety. In Demonbane, you’d be playing normally as the characters are facing off against a spider monster but suddenly without warning, the game transitions into a weirdly misplaced and completely free H-Scene and it’s like… isn’t there a better context for this ?

For as much as Eroge has h-content in them, I always found their implementations to be wholly uneven across the whole medium. Some eroge want to say something with their H, others don’t and just want you to appreciate the view and some like Nitroplus titles and several others within the genre, are stuck in this middle ground when they feel compelled to add them out of convention rather than because they intended to implement them. Also rape, is the most vile act one can subject a human-being to so it makes for easy shock value. I don’t like that, I don’t care for that. Muramasa is already a pretty dark story and while some H-Scenes do serve a purpose narratively, and Kageaki’s sexual tendencies says a lot about his character (more on that later), the way the game handles that content and that subject matters within the framing of the narrative leaves a lot to be desired.

For example, in the first chapter of the game, we are the witness to a pretty heavy scene of physical torture done by one of the antagonist to a group of kids. The situation is already pretty bad, one of the kid loses his sight and a girl literally got her limbs cut off and these are conveniently shown out of frame but also the girl gets well… raped and this is where we go from a scene that should be terrifying in nature to something akin to an absolute clownfest. Suddenly the girl who up to this point never displayed any heavily sexualized features, is suddenly given a pair of developed breasts the size of Britney’s and an ass the size of Rihanna’s out of nowhere thanks to the power of CG (contextual graphics). But then their tormentor after cutting off her limbs (again shown out of frame because this isn’t what you came for) tasks another kid to rape her but since he couldn’t get hard due to how horrifying the situation was, the villain cast “erection 10” on his penis to keep it up again and again and eventually the poor dude literally piss on the corpse of her comrade. Later in a fight scene, it is explained that the reason the villain was even able to perform such a task is because he has the ability to control fluids of any kind including blood and of course urine and water in general since he proceeds to attack the main character with an epic typhoon attack after this explanation.

This is a scene from chapter 1 and what I would describe as a “Nitroplus moment” but at least all of these events were added in a torture scene so there’s some level of build-up to it, some scenes just happens randomly and without warning for the hell of it. You don’t get at any perspective from the victims and also the consequences of these scenes are never exploited within the narrative as the two characters involved are more busy being traumatized by their missing members and dead companion than the actual rape stuff.
This is all a bit irritating because otherwise, the story would still work without these explicit scenes, it’s a game talking mainly about murder, about what it means to kill and thus, it’s an already extremely violent game and that excessive use of sexual violence just feels forced and out of place. There is an “All-Ages” version available of course if that content turns you off completely but they censor it very poorly and also removes the violence which is an essential part of the game’s overall aesthetic and tone and thus the regular 18+ version is the most optimal and likely intended way to experience the game. The lack of thought, grace and subtlety put behind those is what irritates me and if you really want me to nitpick even further, I also think the game’s budget is too low to make them good, there’s only 2 or 3 CG’s per H-Scenes and very little dynamism or creativity so even as “erotic” scenes most of them falls flat on their goddamn face if you can look past the god awful framing.

Of course this isn’t my only issue with the game but I think this is probably the only real overall issue I can’t really excuse and I can’t really defend because it’s such a signature Nitroplus™ staple that pretending this didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the game or its credibility would be simply a lie…

So anyway, after making 99% of the people who were initially interested in the game flee to Mexico or something, I think we can finally start talking about the game itself shall we ?

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa, despite everything I’ve just said regarding its “erotic” content is a work most people would consider to be a “kamige” and kind of received a memetic legendary status amongst the crowd of Visual novel Reader known as “JOP’s”. JOP, short for “Japanese Only Patricians” (as opposed to EOP for “English Only Peasants”) is a nebulous subgroup of visual novel readers who have turned the act of learning Japanese and reading VN’s in said language into a way of life ! The JOP community hold certain titles in high regard and have transcended the mortal plane of existence to deeply enjoy the subtle and delicate prose of games aimed mainly at coomers and we respect them for it !

And for the longest time, Muramasa was kind of a JOP stronghold, an untouchable piece of fiction that no English speakers will ever get to read let alone understand. This is because Muramasa despite its appearance is a deceptively complex piece of work to tackle as far as translating it goes as someone need not just be fluent in the language but also need multiple extra layers of knowledge on top of it to understand it all. The game is full of ancient poems written in complicated ways, historical anecdotes that one needs to have a strong grasp on to convey especially since it’s all mixed with alternate history stuff and of course the entire language linked to martial arts and especially bushido which isn’t just a set of techniques that don’t have similar equivalent in English but philosophical concepts applied to the way of the sword. Ittetsu is a massive nerd on many subjects from history, philosophy, psychology, martial arts and all of these are portrayed in high detail in Muramasa.

All of these elements fundamentally goes against the very idea of translating Muramasa, it’s just something that for many years seemed completely impossible, it would take too much time, too much research and would cost way more money than most western VN publishers who already struggles to make it to the end of the month. But by some miracle of circumstances, JAST announced an English release of Muramasa for the year 2021 in what essentially became their biggest marketing powermove since the existence of the company and this new release received a premium treatment that was unprecedented in the industry.
On top of a brand new shiny limited edition, the game was translated by a guy going by the pen name of Makoto and edited by another one named Moogy, these two are well-known in the English Localization sphere for their excellent work on other Nitroplus works as well as other JAST releases. The translation started 2 years after the original release of the game in 2009 and took no less than 10 years to come to fruition, a monumental task when considering the material they were working with but somehow they pulled it off and they pulled it off exceptionally well. It’s rare when JOP’s or even native Japanese speakers praises localization efforts especially in the VN industry as the translation can often-time be sloppy or so different from the original text one might consider it fanfiction but not Muramasa, the translation was claimed by many to be of the utmost quality and astoundingly faithful to the original text and meaning. Some of my friends who have been fans of the game since its release even told me that the English release is pretty close to perfection, as if the game was initially written in English. Very little compromise was made to conserve the original tone of the game, the editor even commented how he wanted to change some lines to fit his own agenda but decided against it for authenticity sake, a bold move that is sadly not seen that often in this industry.

This is fundamentally this version of Muramasa that I’m reviewing today, so before anyone jumps at me because I somehow “didn’t understand something”, I might be inclined to believe you but I also wouldn’t care that much considering the sheer quality of the translation.

And I’m going to be real, this is something that the JOP’s certainly did not lie about, Muramasa is a complex read which requires pretty much all of your attention, the prose has a certain form of flow and poetry to it, some terms were kept as is and the game comes with an handy PDF guide for all of the more specific terms that they couldn’t directly translate because they’re concept unique to certain discipline. I’m not the type of guy who cares too much about how flowery prose can be as I’m not really a literary person usually, I care more about the impacts of the words than how their assembled in a phrase and if you’ve been reading my reviews, you probably noticed how much my 2nd language English make for some very stilted and unnatural scripts.

But I can only applaud how well-written from a technical standpoint Muramasa is, it’s genuinely impressive even when I’m not usually sensible to it.

The story takes place in Yamato, a fictional alternate history Japan in the 1940’s ruled on one hand by the iron-fisted and tyrannical Rokuhara Shogunate and on the other by the GHQ, an American force who recently established themselves in the region and are more or less trying to take over the place. In the world of Muramasa, warriors don’t simply just fight with swords and guns but with big suits of mechanical armor going by the name of “Tsurugi” (or “Crux” if you’re a filthy gaijin !). These are essentially tiny mechs and some of the more unique and powerful ones even possess something called a Shinogi which is a special power they can activate in critical situations and can do all sorts of things such as controlling fluids, controlling magnetic fields, create black holes, turn invisible and so forth and so forth.

But recently, a calamity coated in silver known only as “Ginseigo” who belongs to no factions at all has started going left and right and destroying different settlements leaving no traces in its wake.

But one man, piloting another mysterious Tsurugi by the name of Muramasa has made it his personal mission to track down and stop Ginseigo in its path of destruction, this man is Minato Kageaki, a somber, aloof and mysterious man with a troubled past and bound with a terrible curse : Those who chose to pilot Muramasa must follow the law of balance, for each foes one slay, a friends or lover must be slain in return !

After a small prologue chapter showing the struggle between Muramasa and Ginseigo, the game decides to start its first chapter in a very peculiar way by making you follow the point of view of boy by the name of Yuhi as he’s investigating the disappearance of one of his friend alongside two other comrades. This intro is meant to be a play on the typical visual novel scenario, with a regular boy living a regular life, constantly woken up by his childhood friend and the typical sleazy best friend character. This illusion won’t last for long however as quickly the chapter ramps up in intensity and reveals Minato Kageaki, a somewhat socially awkward cop who really is a convicted criminal working for the police to be the main protagonist of the game.

This is one of many instances of the game toying with the typical tropes and codes of eroge and visual novels, it seems that Ittetsu Narahara in many ways wanted to break the mold of that typical structure. I obviously don’t know the guy himself but he seems to be quite knowledgeable on the world of visual novel either through passive observation from his time working with Nitroplus in-between his time as a kendo instructor or because he really has an appreciation for the medium in the first place but unfortunately the little information we have on him as a person really can’t help determine if he has a fondness for those tropes or a deep seated bias against them. Nonetheless, I find the first chapter of Muramasa to be a terribly effective opener even if the climax of it is a bit ruined by the so-called Nitroplus™ moment mentioned earlier in the review. It establishes the world of the game rather well by putting us in the shoes of the little people and tricks us just long enough to make us think Yuhi would actually be the main protagonist (à la Simon from TTGL or Cruz from Needless) but alas this is promptly stopped by his hopes and dreams being coldly shattered by the blade of Muramasa having to obey the law of balance.

In fact, even that law of balance itself isn’t entirely explained to you from the get-go, while we can have somewhat of an understanding of it from context clues alone like the chant Kageaki says before mounting his mech or even how the story plays out, the game try to use a clever but slightly faulty designed route system in order to demonstrate it to us. Much like other games of the genre, making choices privileging one heroine over the other will make her affection towards us stronger, however whereas other VN’s would simply take these flags and addition them in the end to determine which route we’re going to end up on, here the game will show us the affection meter at the end of each chapter which is always share between the two heroines and a third party who participates in the episode and whoever has the most points by the end of the chapter gets killed ! So you need to do the opposite of what’s expected of you and try to make your preferred heroine survive by the end of the common route which is around the end of chapter five.

It’s an interesting system on paper and a rare attempt at ludo-narratively explaining to us how the law of balance work before explaining it to us but sadly there’s a few issues with how it works in practice and even if it’s suggested not to use a guide on your first playthrough that doesn’t mean one isn’t vividly recommended on subsequent ones.

For one, the conditions you have to meet by the end of chapter 5 can be a tad bit specific, at first I thought the goal was simply to keep one of the heroines alive by the end of the game but it turns out the conditions are a bit more specific than that…

You do have to keep either one of the heroines alive but also have a specific amount of affection point with them going into chapter 5, 3 for Kanae and 4 for Ichijo which is completely arbitrary and makes zero sense with the way Chapter 5 plays out ! Chapter 5 diverges just a little bit from the episodic nature of the common route and thus doesn’t actually introduce a third party, except there is a third party ! A random journalist Kageaki met at some point before chapter 5 and developed a friendship off-screen is killed off instead to make the story work… It's a bit awkward and honestly kinda makes the whole execution of the mechanic fall on its face (and spoiler : it’s not the only time where the game attempts at introducing game mechanics in a messy manner).

But enough about ludo-narrative consistency, this is a VN after all and thus the primary reasons you’re even experiencing this is for the story so let’s talk about it. The game is divided into a 5 chapter long common route, 2 other routes focusing on either of the two heroines Ichijo and Kanae and one final true route which is meant to wrap up the story in a somewhat satisfying way ! A typical structure for a game like this even with the original way the game handles its flag system.

The common route is a series of episodic adventures which sees Kageaki and the gang dealing with the local villain of the week. For the sake of clarity, at the start of the game, Ginseigo steals Kageaki’s sword and has divided into multiple “eggs” which were spread in the four corners of Yamato, once a person comes into contact with said eggs they become infected which doubles their power and erase their doubts but in return puts them on timer as each of those eggs would hatch at any moments turning the individual into a clone of Ginseigo and as it is established at the start, you really don’t want to deal with more than one Ginseigo !

This means that the first half of the game is a bit repetitive and predictable, Kageaki goes to a place, finds a villain to kill, there usually will be some token nice character who always end up dying despite the game’s best effort to make them likable as they have enough death flags to open a football stand during world cup and their usually would be one or several cool robot fights in the end. Out of all these episodic ventures, only chapter 5 deviates from that structure by instead being an expository chapter where Kageaki gets attacked by Psycho Mantis which gives the game a nice enough excuse to talk to us about Kageaki backstory.

The quality of each of these individual chapters greatly vary from one another but they’re usually not too long to complete, maybe like 4 to 5 hours each which is nice enough to spread out your play sessions, I’d say that overall I did enjoy most of these episodic chapters, the only one I wasn’t a huge fan of was the third one because it was kinda long, kinda boring, bogged down by a stupid plot and a lot of info dumps about shit which will ultimately not matter as well as scenes where the characters act like typical VN heroines which they never really do outside of a few moments mainly to take a jab at how cliché these are.

Speaking of the characters, I’d say this is yet another part of Muramasa’s I’m slightly mixed on. The game has quite a few of them but has a very uneven way of using them, they’re certainly not lacking in personality thought which I appreciate and the different interactions they tend to have between them is pretty good, however they also can end up being very undercooked. Kanae for exemple is one of the two main heroines of the game but I didn’t find her schtick to be particularly memorable, she’s a psychopath who loves to kill and will do so without question making her quite a dangerous foe. But the problem is that she’s written in a very inconsistent way, sometimes hating Kageaki and sometimes acting like a caring wife to him and that comedic aspect of the characters in contrast to her true role within the story never manages to make her all that interesting which will be an issue when discussing the true route of the game.

Ichijo fairs a bit better in that department, she’s an high school who has a blind idealistic view of justice, where she needs to defeat bad guys and take revenge on Rokuhara and their tyrannical reign, she is the typical shonen protagonist archetype, I found her to be really interesting from the get go, her introduction is one of the most memorable parts of the VN and she sees in Kageaki an absolute symbol of justice that she must follows in the step on which later down the line makes for some deeply fascinating character conflicts when the veil of lies is lift up and reveals the truth of Kageaki’s character (I also found a lot of her more softer moment to be infinitely more adorale and funnier than Kanae’s antic, honestly the only really good part of Kanae is her assistant Sayo which is a really fun character on its own).

Speaking of Kageaki, I found him to be the best character of the game unsurprisingly since he’s the main character and the vessel through which most of the game's thematic depth is channeled ! At times, Kageaki is the absolute epitome of an edgelord, going into existential dreads and using lines such as “Don’t need to show me nightmares, I live with them every single day” which makes my 13 year old emo phase flutters and cringe at the same time. However, I did find him to ultimately be a pretty endearing character, the guy is just… a huge weirdoe, he’s not fit for society and it shows, he’s blunt and honest to a fault even when it comes to rizzing the ladies which he absolutely sucks at ! He has a lot of weird habits and quirks that makes him entertaining and makes every situation he finds himself in pretty entertaining as a result.

In some way, he reminds of Rance from the Rance series only if Rance was a pathetic socially anxious worm with years of unresolved traumas and cynicism ruining his ego and sense of self ! In fact his self-destructive behavior is reflected even during the intimate moments he shares with the different heroines, since Kageaki seems to have lost control of his life, he tends to channel a lot of his desperate frustration and need for control on his partners which means that he doesn’t just make love to them… HE FUCKS THEM ! AND SOMETIMES WORSE ! And believe it or not, there’s a genuine explanation on why he’s like this in bed but I’m not a sexologist so I’ll stop there, we already talked about sex enough in the first part of this review anyway.

The most interesting part about Kageaki however isn’t just his personality and quirk that’s only one way to make a character endearing without making him just a simple pity party or a collection of clichés, it’s the struggle he goes through, the philosophy and ideology he develops through those hardships and how they clash with the ideals of other characters in the story and the world at large !
And in that regard I think Muramasa succeeds at keeping that aspect of the game thoroughly engaging in the long-run but not perfectly as we’ll discuss later when talking more deeply about the game’s different routes and how they complete and comment on these aspects. Kageaki is a man with a troubled past and a responsibility to atone for his mistakes and the crimes of Ginseigo which will later learn is his sister Hikaru who kinda went crazy and stole one of the family’s treasure to bring death and destruction upon the world and thus the personal quest of Kageaki is to stop her from doing all of this shit but sadly things ain’t that easy because of the law of balance we previously mentioned.

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is a heavily philosophical game, it talks about justice, heroism and how these concepts can be twisted by different conflicting points of views and ideologies. It’s a story which explores the nature of what it means to kill for what you believe in and the morality behind murder. At points the game can seem simplistic in nature, after all the final message of the game is that killing people is always bad regardless of one’s reason for it and that peace is the noblest pursuit. At points it can feel like the game is doing a lot of sophistic centrist bullshit like “both side bad” and all that jazz or god forbid the “If I kill them, I’ll be the same as them” but I think that out of all stories I’ve experienced, Muramasa offers a pretty unique way of tackling these rather simplistic idioms.

There are many stories in the world which teaches values of pacifism and how spreading good is always better than succumbing to evil but a lot of these stories fail to actually convince us and reflect on why this truth should be absolute and if there’s even some nuance to it in the first place. It’s one thing to write a story about how “killing is bad”, it’s another thing to convince us that it’s ever true at all, after all, we live in a world drought in conflicts and tyranny, with powerful peoples controlling and toying with the lives of a lot of innocent people just for their own gain ! I won’t hide the fact that I’m a bit of an extremist myself, I think that we should do more political assassination and that you can’t change the world without breaking a few eggs and burning a few cars in the process. If you read my Cold Steel reviews or just read my writings in general, I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea of compromise and consensus, mainly because I live in a country where social progress is so slow because it abides to that single-minded mindset ! I’m all about picking a side and fighting the good fights in your own way ! I believe in the potential of humanity to transcend pain and evil and eventually progress into a cosmic age of enlightenment where everyone is their best selves and society is thriving instead of stagnating !

But I have never taken a life myself, especially a human one. The closest thing to it that I still remember fondly to this day is killing a goat for my consumption when I was a child and not feeling like eating it the next morning ! When life ends, there is no room for redemption, for punishment, for progress, killing is but a temporary solution and a last resort ! During the game Kageaki will have to concede his idea of justice to the reality of the law of balance he has to obey ! And at many points Kageaki is offered the possibility to stop the massacre, to live his own life on his own and maybe go into the forest or something ! He sees the situation he finds himself in as a tragedy, he refuses to call himself a hero because of the horrible actions he’s forced to commit and sees himself more like a demon even if that too is a way of coping with the reality of the act he commits !

Kageaki is a hypocrite with a goal and this goal is the elimination of Ginseigo, that’s the only thing that matters to him, the completion of his quest above all else.
Sacrificing himself and a couple of collateral damages in order to save millions of people, that’s the way Kageaki has to deal with this justice but is he even capable to go all the way and is it even right to do so ?

Kageaki despite his stoic nature is a profoundly good person who wants to do good, he can’t stand seeing injustice before his eyes, he’s just a normal guy who was forced into a path of bloodshed and needs to find meaning in the way of the sword. There’s a scene in chapter 4 where Sorimachi one of the best antagonistic characters in the game confronts him on this and it’s legitimately one of the coolest scene in the entire Visual Novel and the moment I understood that maybe just maybe under the brooding 2009 edge there was something to be found here than most other piece of work talking about similar subject matters don’t have.

Unfortunately, this is where my praise for the games kinda starts to deviate a little bit because the execution is a bit uneven across the entire package. Ittetsu Narahara has two wolves inside of him, one is a wise erudite old man with years of experience, knowledge and a personal philosophy he has forged through the path of the sword. It’s a man who never misses to inform you on little details and teaches you about stuff you may or may not give a shit about. Sometimes this gives the game a lot of flair, especially during battles when the action stops to talk to you about kendo techniques, about stances, about distances, range, and how effectively one could cut through steel or break an arm. There’s an entire fight within chapter 5 which is literally 30 whole minutes of 2 characters staring at each other trying to outplay the others and overthink their every move ! It’s the type of Baki The Grappler type of excessive attention to detail and tension which makes every fight feel more real than the last ! Even during the aerial mech battles with superpower involved there’s always a sense of suggested realism, weight and flow to each of them that make them tense and exciting even if sometimes they do tend to drag on for a bit too long.

However this way of writing also leads its way to a lot of pointless stuff that breaks the pacing and only exists to give more meat to the setting even when it ends up mattering very little. One problem I have with the way Muramasa handles its worldbuilding and internal political struggles is that they pretty much exist as set dressing and suggestion of something bigger than itself ! It definitely makes the world feels more like a complete package but sometimes the game will info dumps you for literal minutes about pointless details while completely overlooking others which could’ve been interesting concept to develop further like for example the whole “Tsurugi dies if you contradict their worldview” or something which is perhaps used twice to different level of effectiveness. This doesn’t really drag down the experience for me but it makes for very uninteresting and rather flat conflicts especially when it comes to how the game handles a lot of its characterization and darker elements.

Because the second wolf inside of Narahara is that of rebellious teenager who dresses in black, listens to Linkin Park, traces artwork of Sasuke Uchiha in his notebook during recess and calls people slurs on Call of Duty Black Ops II while boasting about how much he fucked everyone’s mom. It’s the sort of brooding almost comically excessive amount of edge which ranges from weirdly endearing as I won’t lie to have a certain fondness for that 2009 flavor of emo shit seeping through the crack of every piece of media imaginable but at times it also prevents you from completely taking the game seriously even when it wants to in fact, wants you to take seriously.

At times, Muramasa felt like the philosophical piece of literature people claimed it was with some dark and unnerving moments that wouldn’t be out of place in Berserk but more times than not it felt more like I was reading fucking Akame Ga Kill. The game has a type of humor which sometimes lands and sometimes doesn't and I feel like for the most part it’s there to anime-ify the setting or poke fun at certain conventions but you don’t really poke fun or make a commentary on anything by diving head first into that type of stuff. But also a lot of its darker aspect feels a bit excessive in a way that made just sigh more than anything and created a very predictable scenario. You know that if a character is usually nice and innocent and drops their entire backstory on you they’ll either get killed or worse in the next scene in the most over-the-top Final Destination type of way which is not helped by the fact that the game doesn’t really stop. Its villains are for the most part a series of caricatures with little room to think of them as anything more than a bunch of bad guys to eliminate which kinda makes the point the story is trying to make by the end hard to be sold on !

It’s hard to feel a level of empathy for characters that are meant to be so easily discarded, I think chapter 4 is one of the stronger chapter of the game especially because the action is cool and Sorimachi does his big epic speech while kicking Kageaki in the ribs but it’s also a shining example of the tone of the game working against its own design. In this chapter, Kageaki meets up a group of kids and eventually you know for damn sure because you’ve been conditioned by the structure of the story that these kids are gonna die in the most brutal way possible and yet the game will constantly tap dance around it in a “will-they, won’t-they'' ballet that felt really tiring. It also has the biggest villain yet, a racist american soldier who is impossible to reason with because of how bigoted he is and to show you how much he doesn’t care, he literally made a robot who is powered by fucking dead children because oooooooooooooooooooooh the edge ! Eventually the kids do die after Ginseigo pops up out of nowhere and lands on the island so hard it literally moves which is so completely off-beat with the rest of the chapter’s tone, it’s pretty damn inconsistent.

I think the villain being pretty one note and unquestionably evil like that for the most part is also just a consequence of this game's overall inconsistent character writing. The game has a lot of characters and while not lacking in personality and silly banters with one another, a lot of them end up feels way too undercooked, either because the game kills them in the chapter they were introduced in or because the game doesn’t really spend the necessary amount of time developing them or making them interesting. And while this can certainly be an issue for all the side characters who end up being rather shallow as a result, it is another problem when this happens to characters who are supposed to matter like Kanae, one of the main heroines of the story.

Which leads to probably the single biggest narrative dead-end the game ends up in, its route system. If you have played a visual novel before, especially one with multiple choices, you know that they tend to often alternate perspectives and alternate paths to the conclusion of a story. Route system have been a thing in VN’s since time immemorial and while some try to have a tighter more focused experience with no branching paths which we call “kinetic novels” this game takes the approach most games in the genre uses instead and at least in my opinion not to the game’s benefit. While I can acknowledge the originality of its flagging system and how approximately well it integrates itself to the story Muramasa wants to tell, once you start digging a little deeper we realize that there is a massive imbalance between each route in terms of quality and narrative pertinence.
Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is split into 2 routes, one where Otori Kanae gets to live called “The Nemesis” route and the other where instead Ichijo Ayane survives aka “The Hero” route, each offering a different end to our protagonist in his quest to stop Ginseigo and atone for his sins.

We’ll start with the route that I found to be the weakest part of the game by far, the Nemesis route. In this route, Kageaki is held hostage by the GHQ and forced to work for them as they’re preparing to drop a nuclear bomb onto Rokuhara's fortress. Kageaki ends up in this situation after being tasked by the Emperor’s son (which he’s been working with throughout the game as he was the one pointing him in the direction of his next target) to assassinate the Shogun. At first reluctant, since he doesn’t want to kill anymore than necessary in his goal to kill Ginseigo, he eventually accepts the deal but someone killed him before him. After that Kanae asked him to join her in the temple where the Prince and Kageaki father (who he also was working with, sorry to have missed on these details) as someone is planning to kill the prince under accusation of having orchestrated the Shogun’s assasination.

On his way to the temple, he’s slowed down by a Steel Jeeg copyright infringement which makes arrive late at the temple where Kanae proceeded to enter her own secret personal Tsurugi and kill Kageaki’s dad. Not realizing that his was Kanae behind the armor, he decides to get his revenge on the mysterious Musha but first he gets arrested by the GHQ where it is revealed that Kanae was the cousin of the little kid Kageaki killed at the start of the game and that she therefore seeks revenge. Kageaki however is actually thrilled about this information as he was looking for the person who would punish him for his sin and thus starts a very weird relationship between the two, each seeking the solace of death in one another.

The Nemesis route is conceptually, a good ending because it is the only ending in which Kageaki gets what he truly wants : Death and atonement for his sins. Thematically speaking, it’s a revenge story on both ends and one thing that I actually enjoy about both routes is that while some love blossoms between the 2 adversaries, the girl you chose fundamentally becomes the de-facto final antagonist of the chapter for different reasons. Nemesis route is also the only one to put an heavy focus on the consequences of Kageaki’s action throughout the common route as a ghost of his past eventually comes to haunt him midway through the story. It’s all very solid stuff at least on the paper but sadly, the execution is a tad bit underwhelming.

I think the issue mainly comes from Kanae, Kanae is a cold-blooded killer, a psychopath who loves to kill, in a game which does its darndest to convince you that killing his bad no matter the excuses, it makes for a pretty weak antagonist for Kageaki, instead of confronting Kageaki’s ideology and circumstances and pushing him in a new interpretations of them, Kanae is simply there to give Kageaki’s his sentence. You already know how it’s going to end and yet the game kinda lost me. Nemesis route is mostly just a lot of plot setup and political babble, most of which aren’t particularly interesting to sit through but another thing that drags this route is the over-excessive use of interactive segments which for lack of a better word are all pretty damn bad and makes you sigh everytime you engage in an action segment whereas so far, most of the action scenes played themselves. I ignore why they even did this except to embrace the adventure game nature of early visual novels while serving no real commentary at all, or maybe just to keep your attention.

Kanae is also a pretty undercooked character all things considered and a pretty inconsistently written one at that. On one hand, she’s pretty damn cool and badass because she’s just a crazy bitch which can rush inside a manor and kill everyone there to restore the honor of her family but on the other she also acts way too often like a typical housewife to Kageaki and I really don’t know how this contrasts even adds to her character arc since it seems to only be there for comedy sake. She’s also super underdeveloped to the point that her powers are only half-explained, she has bugs eye but we don’t know shit about it, her servant is an immortal vampire disguising as an old lady but we don’t know shit about it, she wants to avenge her cousin as well as the rest of her family but we barely know jack shit about the relationship she had with them.

Don’t get me wrong, the route has some nice action, but there’s not much juice to latch onto, not really a core-theme that’s developed, the relationship of enemy to lovers who seeks mutual destruction between Kageaki and Kanae is cool in theory but it leads kinda nowhere and lacks the impact than it could have ! If anything, the only reason why this route isn’t plainly skippable is because it sets up some background elements that will be further explored in the game's final route, other than that, it’s pretty disappointing despite some cool albeit underbaked ideas.

The hero route on the other hand…

IS ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT !

The route focus on Ichijo Ayane who after being gifted a Tsurugi by the name of Masamune from Sorimachi at the end of Chapter 4 learns that Kageaki, which she idealized as a grand hero of justice, turns out to be a cold blooded murderer who kills innocent people. As she confronts Kageaki, he doesn’t deny the fact and thus a fight between Full Metal Daemon Muramasa and Full Metal Providence Masamune begins ! Masamune is a tsurugi who believes in absolute justice and whose goal is to eliminate all Evil. Created during Japan’s war after the Mongol, its creator after witnessing the horrors and the atrocities caused by the Mongols was convinced that demons live amongst humans and these demons need to be eradicated.

Like the game precises, history has shown that neither side were either morally good or bad, much like every conflict in history it was all a bit more complex than this, however Masamune kept that blind ideal of Justice and decided to apply it as one of his laws. Masamune is fucking sick, it’s this blue mech who will do anything to triumph over evil and as such, as like a million techniques to do so, most of which involves using its pilots body parts as ammunition for its different techniques (it’s fine since Tsurugi’s can regenerate their pilots almost completely, it’s just terribly painful). It’s a rather clever visual way to clue us in on the true theme of this route and by extension the entire story of the game as a whole because as much as Masamune claims to fight for justice, this justice is a bit fucked up and twisted.

After an initial battle, Ichijo spares Kageaki after learning that he’s forced to obey the law of balance and propose to kill people in his steeds so that the law of balance never activates and he can accomplish his mission without claiming anymore innocent lives.

I absolutely love the Hero Route, if you have to read Muramasa, regardless of your first impression or what you may think of the game afterwards, it’s really for this route in particular. Everything is so tight, so focused, so perfect that the few flaws I find to the route are only H-Scenes related which I won’t further elaborate on. Because Kageaki pretty much plays second fiddle to Ichijo, he pretty much hides himself cowardly behind Ichijo’s idea of Justice. Ichijo is your typical shonen protagonist, hell bent on getting rid of Rokuhara for the evil that they represent and this goal aligns well with Masamune and his ideal of justice. However she will soon find out that justice is a feeble concept and that killing people regardless of how evil one might think they are carries with itself a huge toll on one’s conscience and that killing in the name of justice, inspires others to do the same and ignite the fire of everlasting conflict.

The route has so many clever ways to lead us into what the game is actually about that even if I do find some disagreement with the philosophy that’s portrayed, I can’t deny how effective a tale Muramasa is when focusing on these deeper philosophical questions. When confronting Ginseigo, she refuses to fight Ichijo, her adversary is Kageaki and she was slowing down on her conquest just so Kageaki would reach the truth of the law of balance faster and be a worthy opponent to stop her wrath but she only found a cowards who hides himself into a veil of lies. There’s a remixed flashback showing us what would happen if Kageaki had found Masamune instead of Muramasa and it’s simply brilliant in showing us that it wouldn’t be a better situation, in fact it would be even worse.

The law of balance is meant to represent the true meaning of what it means to kill, Kageaki believes in justice just like Ichijo and is willing to kill for it but each time, he has to kill an innocent but only he and he alone decides who is good and who is bad. The people he had killed up to that point, even the most evil bastard, probably also had loved ones or some people working under them, or some people that were hunting them. Killing only invites more killing, that’s what Kageaki’s mother told him before he was sent by circumstances in a path of blood and that’s what the law of balance is all about : If you’re willing to kill an enemy, you must also be willing to kill a friend because the act of killing is not to be taken lightly regardless on one’s reason to do it and especially when it’s in the name of the nebulous idea of justice !

The philosophy might be a bit hypocritical at first, Ittetsu Narahara simply doesn’t believe in one true justice, it doesn’t exist and it never will because true justice is just a matter of perspective. It awfully sounds like a “both side bad” or “If I kill them I’m just as bad as them” and it does, and to many people, this would be enough to cross-out the game as having a cringy almost spineless centristic ideology which by itself is biased on the idea that there is no good or bad sides and that fighting for something, for your own idea of justice is always “evil”.

The current world is draught in conflicts of all kind and it is always asked of us to pick a side, or else we’re simply seen as a spineless coward, that’s at least what I believe in, I believe that one should always fight their own fight and shouldn’t rely on neutral sophistry to justify passivity. But believing in something and killing in its name, is a whole different subject, the reality is that conflicts are eternal, humans will likely never achieve a point where everyone would be working together, it’s a bit pessimistic of a view but that’s what the game believes in.
Ichijo Ayane is directly confronted on this through a series of circumstances and is now forced to fight against Kageaki. Despite her ideology and entire worldview being broken, and realizing how bad it is for others to fight in the name of her justice, she decides to keep on fighting anyway as she believes that eventually if you keep fighting for what you believe is justice, humanity will keep fighting until true justice happens. This is then followed by an absolutely brilliant epilogue where a time-skip happens and both Kageaki and Masamune are dead only leaving Ichijou to inherit Muramasa and therefore inheriting the law of balance and by extension the will of Kageaki, enacting a more just idea of justice !

And here’s what the problem is with this ending, Hero Route simply just put Muramasa into a narrative dead-end because it pretty much went to the absolute extreme of what it wanted to tell as a narrative, at least that’s what I felt when finishing it and the guy who was reading it with me also agreed. In fact, I’m pretty sure most people I’ve asked told me Hero Route was their favorite part of the game by a huge margin. If the game actually ended here, it would be pretty much the ideal thematic ending to the story and as you know, I care more about themes than I care about wrapping up loose plotpoint since I can usually excuse a few plot-holes if the conclusion is satisfying.

But Muramasa sadly, doesn’t end on the Hero Route, it has one extra last “true route” which unlocks after finishing the first two. And while Hero and Nemesis are on different ends of the quality spectrum, the “Conqueror” route is kind of tip-toeing around the middle and I felt that for all that it proposes, I didn’t get much satisfaction out of it. I was expecting something that would build on the conclusion of either route and arrive at a somewhat wholly unique conclusion that would by some sort of miracle surpass what Hero Route was able to accomplish or even say something more.

And yeah, I’d say that most of my issue with Muramasa stems from that last route which is kind of tonally confused and not as tight or thematically charged as the Hero Route. First off, the route starts with a forced conflict between Muramasa and Kageaki on who gets to control the other or if they should work as one. It’s kinda tired, it’s kinda cliché, the conflict goes by fast and it’s only an excuse for Kageaki to start with the mentality he has by the end of hero route without going through the entire arc he went through in Hero route and already you can see how scuffed the conqueror route really is from the get go.

Since this is admittedly a fresh new start, all of the characters that are still alive and have a role to play in the story don’t really go through the same arc they did in their original route. It’s especially apparent for Kanae and Ichijo which you would expect to get an alternate or further development yet alone an actual role to play but despite being the main heroines of the first half of the story, they play second fiddle to Muramasa and Chachamaru which are the new superstar of the show and according to how much merch they got, the ones the marketing team wants you to care the most about.

From a storytelling perspective, I understand the existence of the true route being a necessity, Nemesis and Hero leaves a lot of on-going plot threads unresolved and a lot of mysteries about the world yet to be explored but it really doesn’t help the route from being just a collection of “stuff happening”. We start with an assassination attempt, then hours of monogatari-style comedy banter between Kageaki and ugh… Hikaru… (we’ll get to her), including a whole joke segment then it goes to a full war then some fucking TTGL shit.
There’s very little actual connective tissue between these sets of event and I must admit that the game kinda lost me for the grand majority of the route and while it’s not void of interesting ideas, a lot of these ideas end-up being served undercooked just to prepare the main event that is the final confrontation between Kageaki and Hikaru. For example, there’s a whole arc where Kageaki gets infected by one of Ginseigo’s egg and turns evil meaning that he joins Rokuhara for a short while and that’s an interesting idea on paper but one that drags for too long and doesn’t lead anywhere. There’s an attempt during this part to “humanize” each of the Rokuhara generals which could be perceived as just blood-thirsty bastard but these additional layers are nowhere near exploited well enough to completely turn your opinions of them on their head and tbf, the GHQ not getting the same treatment either kinda dampens the effect. Heck they even skipped Raicho’s fight despite being built up to be a super badass, what a goddamn fraud smh…

I like Chachamaru but I wish more was done with her in the end, even though her ending got snuffed despite having a badass premise, like why skip the fight there I don’t understand… Oh and she also gets graped by Kageaki at some point which heh… wtv I guess…

But at least Chachamaru definitely has more meat on her bones as a character than Muramasa which is just kind of bland and boring. You’d think the personification of the law of balance and her past as a human would give her some depth as being the one true partner of Kageaki but despite her design being right up my alley she gets a total of 1 (one) good scene where she meets one of the children from the start of the game and confronts the sins she committed with Kageaki, it’s probably my favorite scene of the whole route all things considered.

The biggest and I mean biggest black spot on my appreciation of the route however is the main antagonist of the story : Giseigo aka Hikaru. So to put full context on Hikaru, she is Kageaki’s sister who after a series of events in the past entered in contact with one of her family’s treasure tsurugi, Ginseigo. Hikaru has contracted an incurable disease which eats at her bones everyday and during her many periods of unconsciousness, she heard the voice of Ginseigo calling her. Kageaki, thinking her sister went insane (spoiler : she kinda did) after being manipulated by Ginseigo somewhat, decides to take up arms and is forced into a situation where he has to wear Muramasa and kill his adoptive mother. Throughout the game, Ginseigo served as more of an ominous figure, somewhat antagonistic to Kageaki but also pushing him to new height as a rival, she reminded a little bit of Grahf from Xenogears in that regard and the more you advance through the game, the more you realize that Hikaru is perfectly sane and is doing all that killing on purpose.

As opposed to Kageaki, she kinda works ? If you stretch that a bit ? Ginseigo is supposed to also answer to the law of balance but she managed to find a way to bypass it, because the law of balance forces you to slay a friend for every foe. But Hikaru kills indiscriminately and thus doesn’t have to answer to the law of balance, she seeks to ascend to godhood and transcend the concept of human morality, one of her powers being to erase morality within the mind of humans through a song which makes everyone kill each other pretty much. She could accomplish that goal very quickly but as it was demonstrated in the Hero Route, the one person who interests her the most is Kageaki with whom she has a lot of innuendo based conversation with. Hikaru sacrifices the world for her own sake, while Kageaki sacrifices himself for the world… simple enough… right… ?
But that’s what Hikaru represents thematically within the story and even then, that doesn’t really make for “main antagonist” material for me. She really works more as a stepping stone for Kageaki to realize something about his quest and defeating an opponent who actually has a frontal confrontation with his philosophy (literally every other antagonist that he faces) and that’s how the Hero Route uses her to great effect in my opinion.

But what are her motivations ?

Ok get ready for this…

Since she was born without a father to raise her, she started developing a weird daddy fetish. She desires a dad, she wants a dad that loves her and most importantly, she wants to kill anyone so that her daddy loves her and her alone ! AND ALSO SHE REALLY AND I MEAN REALLY WANTS TO FUCK HER DAD !

No I’m not kidding, that’s Hikaru’s whole motivation throughout the entire game, she just has an insatiable incest fetish and transcending the morals of men and ascending to godhood is the only mean to accomplish that goal because Kageaki read her bed stime stories about Greek Mythology and their incestuous relationships.

In fact, at some point, it is revealed that the Hikaru we see is some sort of astral projection and…

Ok so the plot eventually devolves into some weird conspiracy about reviving god who lives deep in the earth and is an alien who created Tsurugi millions of years ago and it leads to like a weird over the top space battle that somehow involves a completely out of place MATH PUZZLE ???? And parallel universes ???? And the fucking prefect dude from episode 2 reviving for some reasons ????

What the ???

Look, I’m a super robot fan, I love TTGL, I love Getter, I love Gaogaigar, Mazinger and I can name a few others easily. I’m an absolute fan of that over the top, reality bending, space-going, moon shattering, Asura’s Wrath fisting action but where the hell does any of this fit into the setting that the game presented up to that point ?

It’s like they wanted a spectacle fight for the final confrontation but somehow couldn’t just settle with the limitations of the game setting so they said, fuck it, we’re Demonbane now ! And I would’ve probably enjoyed this part a lot more if I actually fucking cared about what was presented to me ! If Hikaru wasn’t a complete joke of a villain whose way is too comical to serve as a good conclusion to the story, perhaps a good conclusion to Kageaki as a character but nothing else.

And the game also hinges on hiding a certain plot twist, that Kageaki was actually the father of Hikaru when not only was it the most obvious thing in the world to catch up on but also since it’s actually revealed at the end, it leads once again absolutely nowhere and I’m left there wondering if this game really needed the extra 20 hours it took me to go through the true route if this was going to be the conclusion they wanted to arrive at.
And like a bad joke, the story doesn’t actually end there, you get a whole epilogue, where it’s shown that Kageaki established some sort of Outer Heaven but worse and then another epilogue after that epilogue but actually a prologue to that epilogue, following Kageaki who after defeating Hikaru was mysteriously left alive and now has to cope with his existence.

This small part of the game however, is probably the actual good part of the true route, it explores how Kageaki could live after all that went through and how he could cope with that existence and what path to take from now on. The ending is pretty damn good and easily one of the most memorable parts of the game aside from some weird heap in logic to arrive at the whole “Kageaki decides to enact the law of balance on a global scale by creating Outer Heaven” which essentially is… what the hero route ended on… minus the whole Kageaki living and making an MGS reference part…

Oh and there’s also a sequel hook but sadly as of today, it kinda leads nowhere.

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is a tough nut to crank for me, I think that at its best, it is the terribly intelligent and thought provoking work people claim that it is, Narahara is not a stupid guy, far from it and you can feel that he thought the theme he wanted to explore through and bring it to its absolute limit. Narahara wanted to tell an all-encompassing story which features all of his personal interests and combines them into one even when that can be a little awkward and irrelevant !

This gives FMD a “soul” of its own that you can’t find in most other works and I can easily see how someone could base their entire life philosophy around what’s being told in this game even if it’s up to discussion on my end. But is it fully well executed ? I’m not so sure, Muramasa can either be the highest of peak or the downest of Abyss with a lots of hills and valleys along the way, it’s a work who despite its main subject matter doesn’t really fight the right equilibrium to make all of these elements work at 100% of their capacity. There’s a lot of things the game leaves on the table never to cook anything with and yet they still managed to stretch that shit over 70 or so hours. It is a long game, it is a commitment but was it worth it ?

When it comes to this game, I think that I end up in a similar place than with “Higurashi”. I care a lot about specific parts of the game enough to say that I did enjoy it and have some actual respect for it. But so much of Muramasa is just nothing to me, especially the Nemesis and true route (outside of the blind guy and ending) which were underwhelming despite the neat ideas and narrative prowess they might have.

My recommendation if I wanted to be really petty about it, is to read the game with the Hero Route and stop there and only if by the end you wish to dig further then only I would invite you to read the rest to give yourselves your own opinion about it !

The True Route for me doesn’t do much more than what the Hero Route didn’t already accomplish much more gracefully.

It’s a tough game to rate and thus, It’s going to be the first review I’m gonna leave unrated until further notice. I'm glad to have played it however and I acknowledge how much of a cult title the game is as a whole but it’s not for me… It was simply… too unbalanced…

Hoo boy...

I just don't see much of a really good game here, to be honest. When you're not watching cutscenes for a story that is kind of intriguing albeit really boring to watch, you're forced to slog through shitty combat or run at an insanely slow pace through maps. My condolences to anyone that plays this game without the use of an emulator's turbo mode because holy shit this game is so... damn... SLOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

Takahashi is trying to do something here and I just don't know if what this game offers is enough to get me really interested in seeing what the other two games in this series have to offer.

I went into the Muv-Luv trilogy on a whim like I always do with everything I watch, read and play.

I'm one of those people who were extremely tired after a few routes in Extra while reading and it. It was not that bad per se, but classic school-life VN romance eroge aren't my thing at all, however I trusted the hype and went into Unlimited which was still kind of similar in terms of romance eroge but the settings instantly hooked me up since I love seeing realistic politics and detailed worldbuilding.

Then... I hopped onto freaking Muv-Luv Alternative, even if a lot people seem to feel it's very slow at the few first chapters, I was already loving it. It took everything that was set in the previous entry and elevated it to a majestic and powerful level as well as including an indecent level of character development especially for Takeru, even Extra was extremely well used in the process which is insane to me since as I said earlier, I was tired of Extra, and that made me like it more.

One thing that is very important about this work is how much it's human at its core, it's funny, it's sad, it's epic, it's detailed, it's everything I'm asking from a piece of fiction, emotions are very important to me and this shit made me feel EVERYTHING. MLA is a story about humanity facing a unknown threat that is eventually going to exterminate us all, it's trying to unite but we're seeing how difficult it is even though the BETAs are the enemy of ALL of us. Humans are stupid by nature, we're afraid of the unknown and that includes other continents, countries, regions and people. Basically cultural differences.

After a long and insane build-up in Alternative at seeing all of this, humanity finally united to save itself from its REAL enemy, the BETAs, there is nothing more beautiful than this, the humankind finally came to the same conclusion, and treated everyone as equal even if temporary.
It might never happen in the real world, but Kouki Yoshimune definitely wants to believe it and I also do.

MLA is extremely violent and extremely sad but it is a life-affirming story screaming at us to LIVE and aim for a better FUTURE.
Cherish the people you love, make good actions at your scale, try to understand other people whether they're culturally very afar from you or not, be passionate about what you love. In other words : LIVE.

My first venture into Takahashi's video game design, as well as the "Xeno" series and well... it's interesting that's for sure.

This game is insanely ambitious, to a fault. The combat is unique, but poorly executed and therefore mediocre. The platforming is atrocious, and the sudden shift in puzzle-heavy dungeon level design near the very end is confusing. It just doesn't mesh. But at the same time, I respect the game even at its faults because I can tell there was a lot of innovation, or at least an attempt.

What makes Xenogears iconic is its story and presentation and, even then, I'm widely conflicted. There's much that I really liked, but much of the plot beats and resolutions either just didn't hit or were compelling but extremely convoluted and so rushed that it all comes at you in waves of exposition instead of natural build-up. It's a real shame that the most intriguing portion of the story (Disc 2) is incredibly rushed and cut. Therefore, the most climactic and important part of the story felt kind of... hollow.

I respect the hell out of the ambition this game has, but I also equally don't care for how much that ambition really got in the way of itself sometimes.

8.5/10

While I'm still not a fan of the slower turn-based combat in RGG games, I'll admit they definitely improved the gameplay compared to Y7. The story felt imbalanced in my opinion. This definitely like this was more Kiryu's story than it was Ichiban's, and it feels like they tried to balance that out by giving Ichiban all the special minigames (Sujimon League, Dondoko Island, Miss Match, etc.). The characters were handled well for the most part. Seonhee becoming Kiryu fangirl was a bit weird, but I could roll with it. Chitose in particular was one I wasn't expecting to be a big fan of, but their story definitely took me by surprise. Bit disappointed that Gaiden set up Hanawa as a character, but we don't get any more details surrounding him. Soundtrack was good. Not an incredibly memorable one like other RGG titles, but there's yet to be a bad RGG soundtrack.

Overall, this felt like Kiryu's story that Ichiban was just side character in despite being a protagonist as well. Regardless, it's still a fun time worth playing through.

I’ve been a MegaTen fan for a super long time now, ever since I found Persona 2: Innocent Sin on my Dad’s PSP. That game changed me as a person to be completely honest. I then dove further into the series, playing Eternal Punishment, Soul Hackers, Digital Devil Saga, etc etc. I eventually got around to P3FES in the summer of 2019. I loved it to death, as I was going through a lot of change in my life at the time and the game was like a little escape for me. It took me all throughout June, and I beat it at the beginning of July. The ending, which is iconic itself, had me crying a little bit, and Memories of You quickly became one of my favorite songs from a game ever.

Now when I heard that there was going to be a remake of Persona 3, I was super skeptical. I couldn’t believe it. Then, when the trailers started rolling out, I was even more skeptical. I really didn’t want Atlus to “Persona 5ify” one of my favorite games, and from the first couple trailers for Reload, it kinda seemed like they were doing that. But, as more things started to come out about the game, I became more hopeful and was actually pretty hyped for it. I preordered it, and played it at midnight on launch. Needless to say, I was pretty immediately blown away, and I adored what Atlus had done.

I did (and still do) have some minor nitpicks so I’ll go over those here.
- Some music (mainly near the beginning) didn’t play in the right spots
- Some of the remixes are pretty meh, the big ones I didn’t really care for were Mass Destruction and Unavoidable Battle
- I much prefer the anime FMVs from the OG for the most part, but there were a couple exceptions
Those are all of my complaints, seriously. Only 3 things, which even baffles me considering how critical I am of remakes.

Everything else that the game did though I absolutely loved. Like loved loved loved. Most of the new remixes are fucking phenomenal, the new hangout gimmick with the SEES members was super cute and they were super fun to go through and Tartarus had new life breathed into it and it looked great. The ending got me hard here as well. It was a mix of just how good the cutscene direction was, how good the music was, and my overall nostalgia for the game and how it helped me through a hard time in my life. I was sobbing, HARD. My shirt is still drenched as I write this. The Memories of You remix is gorgeous, and I will not be able to listen to it without sobbing uncontrollably for the foreseeable future.

Overall, an amazing game.