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Brave Fencer Musashi
PlayStation
Too Much 3D, Too Soon
2/5 stars
“Brave Fencer Musashi” (“BFM”) is an old Squaresoft game for the original PlayStation that I just finally got around to playing. Actually, I didn’t add it to my backlog until around 2010 anyway, just because I didn’t think it looked like it was worth playing when it was new. Time can do strange things to our perceptions and memories, thus I found myself considering some older games for purchase, after playing illicit ‘demos’ of them through emulation software. After playing the first chapter of “BFM,” I thought it would be worthwhile to buy a near-mint copy off Amazon Marketplace for less than $20. In doing this, I learned several valuable lessons about why game demos are often painfully short and about never second-guessing my initial gut reactions.
Presentation
As a 5th Generation game that uses a polygonal graphics engine, “BFM” is utterly, revoltingly hideous. The environments are blocky and blurry, there are jagged edges on everything, and character models are lucky if they are made out of more than 10 polygons. Using the term ‘textures’ to describe the images mapped over the polygons in “BFM” would be a misnomer, with the term ‘smears’ being more appropriate (or solid colors, in the case of most characters). Even worse, in the intervening years between the 5th Generation and the 7th Generation, I had forgotten just how horrible those old PS1, N64, and Saturn games looked: It’s not just because of the blockiness, blurriness, and jaggies, but because the game engines were so primitive and lacking in polygon-pushing capability that any bit of camera movement causes THE ENTIRE GAME WORLD to twitch, flicker, and convulse. Even playing this game with all the upscaling and smoothing capabilities of the PlayStation 3 doesn’t make it anything short of an eyesore.
On the other hand, the sound in “BFM” is remarkably great. While the voiceacing is about on-par with what one would expect from anime dubs from the same time period, including a variety of recognizable anime voiceactors, the music is spectacular. The soundtrack in “BFM” has a number of really catchy and pleasant tracks that hearken back to a time when Squaresoft was the uncontested champion of game soundtracks.
Story
“BFM” is supposed to be a comedy. Set in the Allucaneet Kingdom (pronounced ‘all you can eat’), Princess Fillet has found her castle under attack by a steam-powered robot from the Thirstquencher Empire. As a last resort, she uses her inherited ability to summon beings from other dimensions using a mineral called ‘binchotite’ to call forth the legendary hero who defended the realm in the past: Brave Fencer Musashi. But instead of summoning the hero, she ends up with a child samurai who just happens to be named Musashi (and in a fit of feminine angst receives the dubious title of ‘little turd’ from Princess Fillet).
Little Turd Musashi must first liberate the legendary sword, Lumina, in order to defeat the Thirstquenchers. To help him on his way, he is provided with the OTHER legendary sword, Fusion. After an initial chapter in which Musashi uses Fusion to retrieve Lumina, then uses both swords to trash the steam-powered robot attacking the castle, he is sent forth on a journey to collect 5 elemental scrolls to unlock the remaining powers of Lumina, which will allow him to put down the threat of the Thirstquencher Empire once and for all.
Now, while “BFM” is supposed to be a comedy, it isn’t particularly funny very often. The fact that almost everything and everyone in the game is named after food becomes a tired joke after a while. There are some early examples of Squaresoft’s obsession with weird dialects that later returned en force in “Chrono Cross.” There are a variety of bizarre scenarios that straddle the divide between surreal and stupid, but ultimately end up falling onto the stupid side. There are plot twists that make no sense and undeveloped characters that inexplicably play important roles in the story. If it was funny, the hack-job of a narrative would be excusable… but I never found myself laughing.
Gameplay
“BFM” plays out over 6 chapters. The first chapter is a linear run through a forest up to the top of a temple, with a mad scramble back to the bottom where a boss fight awaits. The rest of the game is nothing like that.
Instead, the vast majority of “BFM” plays a bit like a top-down ‘Zelda’ game, except with hideous polygons and a claustrophobic camera that is ALWAYS too close to the action, can rarely be adjusted, and in those few occasions it CAN be adjusted must be moved with the L2/R2 buttons instead of the right analog stick. Aside from the bad camera, “BFM” also fails as a ‘Zelda’ clone due to Musashi’s questionable swordplay. While he does have two swords, Fusion is too short to be of real use and Lumina is too slow. To top it off, hit detection in this game isn’t very good, which often leads Musashi to getting hit when he shouldn’t and enemies not getting hit when they should (as well as items dropped by enemies frequently falling through the floor).
While “BFM” is an old game, it DOES actually support the left analog stick for movement (in addition to the d-buttons), but the analog movement is really finicky and overly sensitive, making it very difficult to control Musashi’s movements with any precision. Even worse, he has very slippery shoes and slides around a lot when he is supposed to stop moving. Unlike older ‘Zelda’ games, “BFM” also wants to be a 3D platformer, throwing lots of gaps and floating platforms at Musashi. The finicky/slippery movement controls combined with early attempts at 3D platforming combine to make “BFM” an incredibly frustrating game to control. I found myself constantly dumping Musashi into rivers, pits, crevices, lava, etc. because the controls were so poor. While falling into such an obstacle usually doesn’t kill Musashi outright (though there are a few contextual situations where it randomly does, which is even more frustrating), he does take damage before reappearing on the edge he just fell off. During the course of my playthrough of the game, I lost far more life to falling off things than I did to enemies.
Musashi’s adventuring headquarters is Grillin Village at the foot of Allucaneet castle. Here, he can spend money collected from enemies to buy healing items, a room at the inn (which is stupid, considering he has a free room at the castle), and food. Musashi can carry a limited number of items in his inventory, and I found it prudent to keep as many healing items on-hand as I could afford… for patching Musashi up after throwing him off a ledge a few dozen times while attempting to make a jump. The game doesn’t have any kind of map system or mini-map, which can make things very confusing when a villager tells Musashi to go to a particular place. I found that there were far too many moments when I just didn’t know how to proceed, even though the game’s sub-menu has a picture of Musashi yelling a reminder of what he’s supposed to do next.
Adventuring is quite a tedious affair, as “BFM” uses a 24-hour clock, which operates on a 30-seconds-per-hour conversion from real-world time. While doing anything, even idling, Musashi’s Binchotite Points drop (restoring a tiny amount of Hit Points each time they drop), while, at the same time, his Tiredness increases. As Musashi becomes more tired, his combat skills suffer and his movement slows (though, I actually found most of the platforming sections to be a lot easier when Musashi was half-asleep). If his Tiredness reaches 100%, he falls asleep on the spot, while if his BP drops to 0, he dies of starvation. In order to micro-manage these two un-fun and pointless stats, Musashi needs to keep food and mint on him at all times to keep him full and awake.
BP isn’t as entirely useless as Tiredness, though, as Musashi must expend it to use special abilities. Special abilities in “BFM” can be temporarily acquired from enemies by charging up the sword Fusion, chucking it at an enemy, then absorbing the enemy to assimilate the ability. Musashi can only have one of these abilities at a time, and most of them are utterly worthless. The only ones I ever found myself using were ‘Antidote,’ considering that poison NEVER wears off in this game, and ‘Fencing,’ which is useful for exactly ONE boss battle.
Aside from the worthless abilities Musashi can assimilate from enemies, he also gains one special ability that doesn’t use BP for each of the 5 elemental scrolls he finds throughout the game’s main quest. These scrolls are key story items, and their abilities are implemented into the game’s dungeon designs fairly well. In fact, the dungeons themselves almost make the game slightly enjoyable…
…but then there are the mini-games. “BFM” is about as bad as “Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers” when it comes to forcing annoying, frustrating mini-games into mandatory activities to progress further in the game. While the obligatory river ride and minecart are about as annoying as one would expect, the absolute worst mini-game, which almost made me put down the game in disgust during Chapter 2 and nearly made me cry when it returned in Chapter 5, involves turning off steam valves. This mini-game provides the player with 24 hours of game time (which isn’t very long) to turn off 8 steam valves on three elevated tiers. The elevator that moves between these tiers ignores Musashi, meaning the player must wait for it if it isn’t on the correct level. After doing some ‘fun’ timed button presses to fill the first steam valve, the player is given a short amount of time (never more than a minute, frequently much less) to both reach the next valve in the sequence and complete its timed-button-press mini-game. There are three valves on the first tier, three on the second, and two on the third, each of which becomes harder to fill and allows less time to do so. Failing a single valve forces the player back to the bottom to retry the entire thing from valve #1. It is easy to fall off the upper tiers, especially when the paths to the valves are blocked by steam plumes and some of the game’s terrible platforming is required. This mini-game may be a small part of the overall gameplay in “BFM,” but it was so horrible, tedious, frustrating, and nearly unplayable that it colored my perception of the entire game (especially after failing and having to reload my previous save THREE times!).
Overall
“Brave Fencer Musashi” is an eyesore filled with stupid comedy and abominable, unpolished gameplay. I should have stuck with my initial impressions from 1998 that made me pass on this game, but time softened my stance to tragic effect. If the sloppy platforming, iffy swordplay and hit detection, and tedious micromanagement of food and sleep don’t make this game undeserving of praise, the inclusion of horrible, mandatory mini-games does. The best way to enjoy this turkey is to just buy the soundtrack and skip the actual game.
Presentation: 2/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 1.5/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
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