Is the game most famous for including a FFVIII demo disc worth playing nearly 30 years after release?
What Is It? You are Musashi, the young resurrection of the famous Brave Fencer Musashi. You have been summoned to the Allucaneet Kingdom to rescue the Kingdom from an invading monster. Upon being transported into this new kingdom, where everything is inexplicably named after food, Musashi immediately wants to go home. Musashi is truly a lovable jerk, or reluctant hero, if you wish, and the character is a huge draw of the game.
The game is an action RPG. You will explore an overworld and various connected dungeons, facing off against common foes, big boss fights, and interact with townspeople along the way. Your overarching goal is to rescue kidnapped townsfolk. Rescue enough, or the right combination, and new abilities will open up for you up at the castle. The game mostly repeats this loop through the 15-or-so hour playtime.
Puzzles and minigames are scattered throughout. Many puzzles can be solved by stealing a nearby enemy’s skills (the game dubs this ‘assimilating’) with one of your two swords and using it in the environment to get past an obstacle. This skill stealing is a major component of the game and is a wonderful way to allow users to pick their playing style through which powerful attacks they leave equipped. Minigames are a mixed bag as there are some timed platforming sections that are brutally unforgiving and may have you attempting them dozens of times before clearing.
Combat is fun as you mix your basic attacks with the assimilated abilities with your learned abilities. Puzzles are mostly light, dungeons are fun, and the NPC interaction is good. All around, this is a great early A-RPG.
The Best Part: It hits a perfect mix of nostalgia and still fun gameplay. The character models are pulled straight from Final Fantasy VII (Musashi is also a Squaresoft game), but you are playing an action game instead of a turn-based one. I’d never played this game until over 20 years after it was released, but it felt like some of my favorite games of the era blended together into something special.
The Worst Part: Those timed minigames are brutal, as is the final boss. I’m less concerned about the final boss, because brutal final bosses are very much of-the-era here, but the minigames can get frustrating if you’re not in the right mood for training your muscle memory to make a perfect sequence of moves. I suspect those tougher sections lose a lot of people, which is unfortunate because this is definitely a game worth seeing through to the end.
The Verdict: Brave Fencer Musashi was an instant favorite from the first time I played the game. It demanded some patience in the minigames and a lot of determination on the final boss, but the playthrough was a fantastic experience throughout and one that deserves to be made available on modern consoles.
How to Play: PS1
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