SmartyScore: 65 out of 100 (Reviewed on Nintendo Wii)

My childhood marked the beginning of the graphic revolution for video games. My first system was a Sega Genesis, my first game was Sonic the Hedgehog.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade is nice to look at, but there's little challenge in what quickly becomes a button masher.

Those games were beautiful in all of their 2D glory, and I sat enthralled while my parents watched, thinking to themselves, “How could this have evolved from Pong?”

But no one could have expected such a presentation of a 2D game as Muramasa: The Demon Blade gives you. This game is by far the most gorgeous game on the Nintendo Wii, and gives you a great mix of old school 2D gameplay with a mix of RPG style. Unfortunately, the presentation is where the fun starts … and stops.

At the beginning of the game, you’re presented with two paths which you can take. You can play as Momohime, a princess possessed by a demon, or as Kisuko, a ninja who can’t remember anything about his past. Their backgrounds are certainly intriguing, but because of the quality of gameplay you may never know how their stories end.

With a name like The Demon Blade, it’s obvious that the ninja’s swords play a heavy role in the game. In fact, they’re what lead you through the game, as certain blades are necessary to progress to new areas of the map. You can hold as many blades as you want, but only three at a time can be equipped. When presented with an enemy battle the action is pretty constant, so the blades can break easily. They fix themselves while they’re sheathed, so it’s really just a ploy to get you to use all of the blades.

Why is it a ploy and not another function of the game? Because switching blades is unnecessary in such an easy game. Muramasa, for all of it’s promise, is nothing more than a hack and slash button masher. The controls are simple: hit A to slash. That’s it. You can move the joy stick different directions to do other moves, but there’s no need. Hitting A repeatedly until your button sticks (as mine did multiple times) is all that’s needed to beat this game.

Here’s a great example: before the first boss battle encountered by Momohime, a prompt on the screen warns the player to save because the upcoming boss is hard. No, it’s not. It takes a while for you to beat the blue, one-eyed monster, but nothing more than mashing the A button is necessary. The boss can’t even attack 90 percent of the time when Momohime is up against him, slashing away. It’s cheap, it’s lame, but it’s an easy way to beat the game.

One cool aspect of the game is that even though it’s a 2D side scroller, a lot of the game is played climbing trees and retrieving various items. Sometimes there’s a healing item high in the trees, other times there’s just the entrance to the next area of the map. Either way, it adds a little to a game which could use some more content.

It’s truly a shame that such wonderful aesthetics are ruined by pedestrian gameplay. Had Muramasa: The Demon Blade’s programmers made the game more difficult by making it necessary to do a few combos here and there, the game would be exponentially better. Instead, I was able to pull off a 100+ hit combo just from mashing A and moving the joy stick left to right a few times. I played this game much longer than I have played other bad games, but it’s impossible to rate it anything better than mediocre. The only reason I’ve rated it as high as I have is because of the beautiful settings and two characters with two stories, which increases the replay value.

** Official game website