As you progress through the game, getting souls from kills and getting spirit from eating food and recovery items you'll be able to forge better, more powerful blades. It's an interesting system and one that helps stave off the repetition of battle, as well as being one you best get the hang of for the game's various boss battles.

Unfortunately you'll do a fair amount of backtracking as you head to said boss battles. Sure the various screens are beautiful to look at as you run through them, with plenty of interesting details such as apartment dwellers eating behind screens, salmon leaping upstream through a river's rapids and gently falling cherry blossom petals, but after a while you just want to be able to quick travel to your destination. Sure the random encounters all go towards helping you level up and collect souls but after you've traveled through a region to get to a boss battle, to then travel all the way back through the same region to get to the next area can be irritating as well as a serious time waster. The occasional palanquin carriers and boats can help you get to where you're going more quickly, but they don't appear nearly as much as you'd like.

You'll spend around eight to ten hours per character's story, with two different difficulty levels for each story, and that's not counting the backtracking you can do after the main story ends to take on the various challenges hidden away in caves. Once you've tackled a story on the harder difficulty level you can attempt the super, mega-hard mode where all you get is one hit point. Plus there are all of those blades to create.

For all of my nitpicking, I still think that Muramasa is a game that really deserves to be played as there's nothing like it on the Wii and it does keep you entertained as you work your way from one beautiful area to another, slaughtering creatures from Japanese myth in the process. I would like to see more variety to the combat, but at the same time, it's not like I breezed through the boss battles, even on the lowest difficulty level. Sure it has its problems, but it is a drop-dead gorgeous game and sometimes you're not looking for a rocket scientist; you're just looking for a good time.

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