The intro to Musashi starts off great with anime showing Musashi running and jumping and slicing everyone to ribbons. The action is so fast and furious to give the feeling that this is the absolute hotness and nothing is going to slow this down. And then the actual game begins and everything pretty much goes down the toilet in that regard. What's left is a mellow action-RPG in which the few good ideas are placed so far between and the slog for most of the way grinds the game down.
The story has Musashi being transported across the universe to a city that is on the back of the Anthedon, a giant flying albino whale. The citizens have scattered as the evil Gandrake has been chasing them down in order to use them to better use the power of nebulium, a powerful element harvested from the local mines. Since the citizens are Mystics this means that they can enhance the nebulium's energy. And, of course, there is also a princess, Mycella, who summoned Musashi and also needs to be saved since she was kidnapped by Gandrake after the summoning.
As soon as Musashi lands in this strange land he learns that his only way back home is to right all the wrongs in Antheum. So this means that there are all the usual elements of getting steadily stronger swords and learning new magical moves along with duplicating special moves off of enemies. This last trick is done by focusing on an enemy and then tapping the square button with perfect timing to learn a new attack.
In a perfect world this duplication trick would be one more element of a fun action-RPG. On its own it's cool indeed, but the action moves at about half of the speed that's appropriate and this novel idea is lost in the general slackness of the gameplay. Musashi himself moves almost like he's underwater whenever he tries to run around. Even navigating through the tiny city of Antheum is a chore with his plodding movement.
It's entirely possible that the game just couldn't handle going much faster. There is some definite slowdown in the graphics when there are too many things going on or the camera is moved around Musashi. Even the water fountains in the middle of Antheum drop the framerate into the teens. Upon entering the larger levels it's best to avoid moving the camera at all. If you want the game to maintain the speed it has at all this is a feature that's best left unused.
When fighting the bosses in the game the camera has even more problems with not knowing exactly where to be at any one time. It's not clear whether this was for dramatic effect or not, but when Musashi was near a wall avoiding an attack the camera would drop down and look up at Musashi. It was a pretty sweet hero pose, but basically useless for seeing where the boss was. The only thing that saved this was that the bosses have simple patterns that can be easily learned and avoided.
If the boss battles had some pattern-recognition and some camera fighting for flavor, pretty much every other enemy is a simple and tedious chore to plow through. One-on-one, the enemies are easy to slice through. It's only the situations where Musashi is being attacked by a group where the game poses some difficulty. So if there's a hassle afoot, it's just a matter of backing up and slice, slice, slice.
So maybe the tactics don't sound too bad and you're thinking that the "tedious chore" bit is excessive, but Musashi involves much more backtracking and spawning enemies that can ever be needed. There's also the problem of the same enemy who gets more moves and more powerful, but the visual difference is pretty much nothing. If there was a different enemy it would've been nice to see them differently too, but this reuse gets old fast. And with levels that have very linear paths to get through them. which are filled with the same enemies, the game is about the constant block, slash, etc.
One mission has Musashi walk along metal bridges which are crammed with robots just sitting there waiting for him to walk up to them so they can be activated. One bridge was a hassle and the rest of the bridges begin to make you think of maybe making a nice piece of toast. But when the game requires Musashi to go back through all of this again in the other direction that I simply jumped past all the slumbering robots and left as fast as I could.
There are even times when Musashi gets off his feet and jumps on a motorcycle or a hoverbike, but even these parts of the game with huge potential become yet another piece of nothing to mindlessly chop through. Musashi rides through a tunnel and robots just sit there waiting to be sliced up. Some robots on bikes get near Musashi even more slowly so he can slash them and it's likely that crossing the street in the middle of the night is more exciting than any of this will ever be.
There are other elements in the game with some basic puzzle solving and platforming elements, but neither of these catch fire either. The same slow-motion action dogs this area as well and for anyone who has played a platformer before the challenges here are all too familiar. If your life is lacking the thrill of using a dodgy double-jump function to cross a lava field, then so be it, but games really need to move on from this to break things up.
I had been playing for a while and still felt that I was on the intro level. It wasn't until someone else asked me how long I had been playing that I checked and realized that 10 hours had already been sunk and I was still waiting for Musashi to get faster or do something, anything, that was cool. I'd love to say that even further hours of exploration made the experience better, but that would be an outright lie.
The one thing that the game does that's novel and fun to pull off is when Musashi picks up someone and carries them. At this time Musashi can attack by bumping the person into the enemy. He can also toss them into the air, do a whirlwind slash, and then catch them. It's easy to do, it's fun, and it's got style. If the rest of the game worked like that this would be solid, but instead it's just a game that looks unique and has no place to go.
The manga shading in Musashi is like regular cel-shading except that the outlines are incredibly thick lines. Combined with the occasional speed triangles that make the screen look like it's about to shatter there's a cool effect for the game. Some of the enemies also have some funky designs and the best feature is that when Musashi slices through an enemy for the final blow the enemy will fall apart along that line. This is best seen on the robots that slide apart and reveal their inner workings for a second before they completely fall apart.