Too much of a good thing is always a bad thing. Period. End of story. Even all that wholesome fruit and vegetables can make you fat if you eat way too many of them. Over-indulgence will always result in suffered consequences.

This is equally true about entertainment. It is entirely possible for a good movie to run way too long and thus become boring. Anyone familiar with The Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels already knows this as a fact. In terms of video games, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a perfect example of a good game that just takes too long to complete.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. This is an extremely simple game that could have been built on Super Nintendo technology. Sure it runs more smoothly than most of the games from that era and is a lot flashier, but you are hacking and slashing your way through hordes of foes in a manner that is, overall, very simple. As soon as you start a new game you are offered a tutorial that informs you how to play and then jump right in. No new features or combat abilities unlock over time. They are all available from the start.

So with such a simple game, why does it take over ten hours just to beat a single storyline? This doesn’t even include the amount of time spent leveling up and crafting all the blades for both characters so you can see all of the endings. An arcade concept was taken and they somehow dragged it out to as many as thirty or forty hours total.

To contrast with an identical yet better game, Dishwasher: The Dead Samurai is similarly simple. All of your combat abilities are available to you from the first level. The only thing to discover are the different weapons and power ups to unlock additional combos. The game doesn’t even reach eight hours long before you’ve beaten it. If you desire you can replay it on higher difficulties or you can just jump into the arcade mode to slash everything apart until you are content. The game can fill up five minutes of boredom or several hours depending on your mood. For the type of game it is, this works perfectly.

Muramasa has no arcade mode to just drop in and play. Challenge rooms of an arcade style must be unlocked by gaining all the different blades throughout the story, sure. The problem here is it requires you to play through the entire game first, and then you must travel between the different regions just to get to them. There is nothing that allows you to just drop in and quickly play until your hunger for entertainment has been satiated.

There are a number of solutions that the developer could have used in order to avoid this problem. That is, aside from including a “Quick Play” option that just throws enemies at you. A different variety of regions would have been excellent, for one. While the four or five different region types are pretty at first, it becomes a tad tiresome when all the artwork is repeating throughout multiple screens of multiple regions. The world is also relatively flat, meaning all you need to do is run from one side of the map to the other. Sometimes there will be a cave system or set of trees that offer some jumps, but the only real effect these have is on combat (which ranges from a favorable addition of flavor to incredibly annoying). The levels in Contra were more complex than what you have here, effectively reducing it to an arcade brawler like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Fatal Fury.

There is no option to avoid these long walks across nothing, either. On occasion you’ll find guys willing to take you to another region, but that’s only useful if that specific region is your target or is closer to your destination. Once you have beaten the game a fast travel mode is unlocked, but by then it’s too late. You’ve already beaten it! What’s the point?

Of course, without all that walking you wouldn’t get into as many fights, and if you don’t fight you don’t earn the experience required to level up. You also collect souls that are used to forge new and more powerful blades. If you want the game’s difficulty to rise steadily and never become agonizingly frightful your best option is to explore every inch of the map, backtrack to unlock new areas when you can and basically grind. One of the reasons the game takes so long is that they expect you to want to do every little thing, and while it’s certainly possible to beat the game and avoid all of that it will be frustrating to do so.

So what you have is a game with pretty environments to look at but boring to explore, hundreds of screens to go through and no method to quickly move between them.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a confused child. It has no idea that it’s a kid and thinks it can just do what all the grown ups are doing. Yet you don’t put a kid behind the wheel of a car, especially since they can’t even reach the gas or brake pedals. Muramasa is an arcade action game trying to play like an in-depth role-playing game with hours of content to entertain. What’s there is fun, certainly, but there’s just not enough of it to justify the long and agonizing journey through two stories for some simple hack and slash action.

Then again, that long play time does allow the game to tell a story that starts out confusing and finally winds up making some level of sense sort of, but that wouldn’t be a problem if the plot was coherent at the start..

If you are going to make a game it is important you know just what it is you are making. Just because you add level-up capabilities to your side-scrolling hack and slash title doesn’t mean it is deep enough to play for dozens of hours. It just means the difficulty progresses more through numbers than through actual player skill. Muramasa would have been a lot more fun if both stories were about five hours long or offered quick travel between the regions. Adding a Quick Play option would have made it a fantastic title to go back to again and again when you don’t feel like anything else, just like Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.

Instead it’s a decent title to play when you feel like it. It’s easy to just stop playing at some point without ever beating it because you got bored of doing and seeing the same things over and over without any conclusion in sight.

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