"This is not a story of heroes. Those who would aspire to be such have no place here."

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is one of the most incredible visual novels you'll ever read. It's not just that it's aesthetically gorgeous, but it weaves a complex tale, dips beautifully within both the feudal aesthetic and hi-tech sci-fi thriller approach, and is written with such a poetic etherealness that when it wants to hit you with something eye-opening, it hits. Hard. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Full Metal Daemon Muramasa is how unwilling it is to hold its punches.

This visual novel depicts the full gamut of the worst of human impulses. While in theory it's a story about a a living soul forged into a set of armor, in practice, it's an exploration of the limits of human depravity. Framed in a very Musashi-like trip through a hyper fictionalized hybrid sci-fi feudal romp within the island nature of Yamato, you're going to get a view of bestial violence, innocence lost, incest, class warfare, blasphemy, obsession, xenophobia, and hatred. Characters are built up as hugely sympathetic, only for the narrative to tear them down in the most spectacular way possible. The story plays on many classic and familiar tropes, such as the romance or warmth that comes with exploring human relationships, and then subverts them them in their entirety. This game is dark, is the point. Beautifully dark, like the most powerful and deeply meditative humanist novels, but it nonetheless revels in exploring the bleakest sides of the human condition, and in doing so it represents an exquisite, elevated kind of tragedy.

There are moments where Full Metal Daemon Muramasa becomes very uncomfortable to witness, and a little like when I played Gunjou no Sora o Koete, I did need to put it down from time to time. This game is nowhere near as explicit or extreme as that one, but thematically it is, if anything, more demanding of the player. It's a little like how the real war stories of old are deeply uncomfortable to read, though it's certainly not of the extreme, overt violence of a Marquis de Sade novel. If you want to see how a visual novel could be elevated to something approaching "high art" or "peak fiction", you owe it to yourself to play Full Metal Daemon Muramasa.

Now despite having read this only halfway through via watching a playthrough on nicovideo.jp and giving up using google translate halfway into that and just looking at the cgs, I can safely say this is the best visual novel you'll ever read without a doubt. Ryukishi truly has created another masterpiece in a long line of amazing visual novels and I'm excited to see what Type Moon has in store for us in the future! FUCK SUBAHIBI / 10

also beans if you're reading this why don't you spend that time actually reading the visual novel :)