I’m talking “unfair” difficult, where there is a delay in jumping off bouncing lily pads, so you die just trying to get across the damn river. I’m not talking “fun” difficult like Dark Souls, where you die, you learn something about beating the baddie, you come back a second time and kill him. The thing I didn’t remember was how difficult this game was to play. On the other hand, the story is so boring and didn’t make much sense. In fact, the music is just as catchy and energetic as I remember. The voice acting is relatively decent as well. The graphics are fine enough for the time, so I can forgive that. Unfortunately, I feel like this game should have just stayed in my memory because it did not age well. Even more irritating is that you have to pause the game to change Lumina’s element, which shows the developers really didn’t intend to integrate those abilities into gameplay in a major way. These swords are how you attack your enemies and their capabilities seem like they would be fun play around with, but you really don’t need to use those capabilities often, mainly just in boss fights and unlocking doors, and when you do, the effects are typically short-lived. Through the course of the game’s opening events, Musashi ends up with two swords: Fusion, which absorbs and assimilates abilities from enemies, and Lumina, which gains five elemental abilities as you play. By the end, the plot twists aren’t necessarily unexpected, merely uncared for because they involve characters you never really had much interaction with, let alone an emotional connection. Later in the game, his rival Kojiro makes an entrance and fights him for no discernible reason.
I’m all for having a hero who, over the course of his adventures, learns how not to be an asshole, but Musashi is entirely focused on himself and saving people just seems to be the way he thinks he can get home. Thankfully gameplay was varied enough to liven things up, but it should be noted the hero is not likable and is a jerk to everyone. The game starts out simple enough with Allucaneet Castle being attacked by the Thirstquencher Empire and Princess Fillet being led down a staircase to summon a hero, whom we come to find out is the legendary hero Musashi. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I never finished it, so I made out to rectify that mistake. I remember really liking the game overall, completing each mission, fighting the challenging but not impossible bosses, finding and freeing all the missing castle dwellers. Back when Square-Enix was just Squaresoft, I played my way through the action-RPG but stopped just short of beating the final boss, which I seemed to do quite often at that age. With that in mind, I decided to begin my journey through the last four physical Playstation games I have left with one I’d started many years ago but never quite finished–Brave Fencer Musashi. My husband tells me nostalgia can be a powerful thing, but I believe that we should all evaluate artwork based on its own merits, not viewed through rose-colored glasses.
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