Started reading Full Metal Daemon Muramasa this evening after a request from a Rice reader, and I'm enjoying it so far. It's quite… dense and heavy going at times, but it's also thoroughly intriguing in that inimitable Nitroplus sort of way, so I'm anticipating great things. It's also one of the highest-rated visual novels I've ever seen on VNDB — and those folks are usually pretty stingy with their ratings — so it was something I wanted to check out at some point anyway.
For the unfamiliar — from what I can make out, anyway — Muramasa is set in an alternate history Japan (or Yamato as it's known here) circa 1940. Since time immemorial, battlefields have been dominated by supernatural suits of armour known as tsurugi, piloted by musha. A tsurugi gets its power from a smith literally infusing his soul and humanity into it — though by the time our story begins, scientific advancements in cloning have allowed tsurugi to be mass-produced without loss of life.
I'll write more about all this on Rice in the near future — likely across several articles — but Muramasa has done a nice job of depicting the situation from a variety of alternative perspectives so far. The initial intro depicts the true horror of these tsurugi on the battlefield — and the massacres that result when they are irresponsibly wielded by the power-hungry — while the first main chapter focuses on a more "human" story: a group of kids who want to track down their missing friend, whose disappearance appears to have something to do with a musha.
I'm not far enough into the game to know much about any other details as yet, but supposedly the narrative explores the ideas of good and evil and sometimes circumstances meaning that you're not able to pick either of them; a lot of it ties in with the real-life legend of the Muramasa sword, samurai culture and the like. It's thoroughly compelling so far, but also clear that it's going to be a challenging, uncompromising read going forward.
The translation is top-notch so far. I follow a bunch of the people who were responsible for it on Twitter, and they're quite rightly proud of their work; it really is excellent. It reads well, it features evocative prose and while there are, of course, moments where the English text elaborates somewhat on what was originally said in Japanese, the tone is consistent. In many respects, it reminds me somewhat of Deus Machina Demonbane, another Nitroplus title that featured florid prose, vivid descriptions, absolutely horrifying scenes and giant robots.
It's a long one — VNDB places it at around 68 hours or so — but I'm definitely interested to see where it goes from here, and particularly to see what other narrative perspectives we're going to witness this all unfold from. The character who is ostensibly positioned as the "protagonist" in the promotional material has only appeared as a side character so far, so I'm wondering what's up with that.
Only one way to find out!
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