I don’t want to say cover bands don’t have any value.
Few things feel better than when you step out of the snow and into a local pub...and
as soon as you open the door, you’re greeted by that gush of warmth, the smiles of a few
pretty ladies and your favorite songs coming from the stage.
Cover bands can be fun.
But at the end of the night, all they’ve really achieved is making you want to hear
someone else’s songs.
Samurai Sword Destiny does the same thing.
Released earlier this month to the Nintendo 3DS, Samurai Sword Destiny is an eShop exclusive
from UFO Interactive...a developer perhaps best known by Nintendo fans for releasing
a whole bunch of really bad games for Nintendo systems.
The good news is Samurai Sword Destiny isn’t one of them.
The bad news is it’s just a cover band.
Samurai Sword Destiny is the Dread Zeppelin to the Led Zeppelin that is Muramasa, a spectacular
action RPG that stands among the very best and most beautiful Wii games of all-time.
Evidently, someone at UFO Interactive is a fan, because Samurai Sword is essentially
playing Muramasa’s hits.
And like most cover bands, it doesn’t have time to play them all.
If you’ve played Muramasa, the similarities should be very clear.
Samurai Sword is paying homage to the spectacular visuals of Vanillaware’s title, only substituting
the game’s art style with a more cartoon-like aesthetic.
The effect is a game that looks similar to Muramasa in style and tone, but not necessarily
in execution.
And so as a result, Samurai Sword Destiny is a much simpler-looking video game.
Muramasa’s stunning use of parallax, its vibrant colors, its rich detail, all absent
from this one.
Again, the similarities are more in the feel and approach than the results.
But to Samurai Sword’s credit, it at least reminds you of one of the prettiest games
of its generation.
Unfortunately, the same Muramasa-lite approach was taken to its gameplay.
That’s where Samurai Sword Destiny loses steam, because as basic as Muramasa’s could
be, it also had a deceptive amount of depth...not to mention an impressive weapon system.
So it had some really nice RPG elements on top of its otherwise simple gameplay, but
Samurai Sword Destiny just keeps the simple gameplay.
And actually, it makes it even simpler.
You basically just slash back and forth across the touch screen.
This makes your character perform a running slash, and although there are other moves,
that’s the only move you actually use.
So it’s just back and forth, back and forth...it gets old fast, but at least the game tries
to remedy this.
There are also levels that run on auto-scroll, kind of like all the running games so popular
in the App Store.
In these levels, you have to avoid obstacles, slash at ninja stars coming toward your face...all
the while, you run forward automatically.
These offered a nice break from the repetitive line drawing, but the game’s formula for
its levels eventually becomes just as stale.
Combat stage, escape stage, combat, escape, get bored, play Muramasa.
All things considered, this is a decent game.
And maybe it’s not fair to compare a six dollar eShop title to one of the Wii’s crowning
achievements, but this thing invokes the comparisons on its own.
After all, Samurai Sword Destiny is a cover band.
The only difference is, Led Zeppelin will never tour again.
Muramasa is ten dollars on Amazon.