Musashi - Samurai Legend

The villains run a company. Gandrake Enterprises has letterhead, executives and an industrial supply chain, and its foot soldiers carry energy weapons rather than spears, which is a strange thing to find on the other end of a katana. That collision of feudal swordplay and corporate sci-fi is the most distinctive thing about Square Enix's 2005 return to the Musashi character, a follow-up to the 1998 PlayStation oddity Brave Fencer Musashi that nobody was especially clamouring for and that arrived looking sharper than it played.

The hook is theft. Musashi carries a long sword and a short one, and rather than levelling up conventionally he takes techniques off the enemies who use them, absorbing an ability mid-fight and adding it to his own set. It gives combat an acquisitive rhythm — you start scanning a room for who is worth robbing rather than who is worth killing first — and it makes the elemental swords feel like tools rather than damage upgrades. Environmental puzzles hang off the same system, so a fire technique lifted from a grunt becomes the key to a locked corridor two areas later.

What surrounds that idea is thinner. The plot has Musashi yanked out of time to rescue the five Mystic Maidens from Gandrake's clutches, and it moves through a sequence of corridors, arenas and boss chambers with very little in the way of surprise. The camera fights you in tight spaces, which is a real problem in a game where parries and counters matter. Level design leans on the same locked-door-and-switch grammar for most of its length. It is short, and it repeats itself before it ends.

The presentation is the part that has aged best. The cel-shaded look is bold and flat in a way that reads cleanly today, all thick outlines and saturated colour, and the character designs have the confident silliness of mid-period Square Enix — spiky hair, oversized weapons, a hero who takes none of it seriously. The soundtrack pushes hard rock against traditional instrumentation and mostly gets away with it.

It landed to middling reviews and disappeared, and that is roughly the right verdict, but the ability-stealing system deserved a better game around it. Play it as a curiosity from a publisher that could still afford to gamble on a mid-budget action title with a strange premise. Musashi's world is a place where a swordsman can behead a man holding a rifle, and the game never quite decides whether that is a joke or a tragedy.