// PC GAMER — GAMING
Muramasa: Revenant Blades has 108 swords, and its definitive update for PC wants to make sure you use them all
The swords may be cursed, but the action is better than ever.
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The Japanese Sword Museum in Tokyo, set along the bank of the Sumida river, enshrines behind glass a collection of remarkable blades spanning hundreds of years of craftsmanship. Books about the longer uchigatana and shorter wakizashi, some of them written by the museum's very donors, celebrate the swordsmiths who hammered them out of steel. But flip through one, and there's a good chance you won't spot the name Muramasa, despite his swords playing a prominent role in some of Japan's most famous battles.
Centuries of mythology building up around the idea that your swords were cursed will tend to do that to a guy.
Vanillaware's Muramasa: Revenant Blades, at least, isn't afraid to lean into the legacy. The 2D action game is so in love with swords it's got 108 of them, and it turns the superstition that Muramasa's swords had to taste blood once unsheathed into a simple but enticing mechanic: Each comes with a unique skill, which can be equipped on another sword only after it's had its fill of bloodshed.
"There's definitely this reputation that the swords of Muramasa are cursed, but what that means is they have power," says director Wataru Nakanishi. "In this game Muramasa is an important character and will create these very powerful swords, but in turn [the protagonists] must collect souls for him, so they have this cooperative relationship based around this dark situation."
In a way Revenant Blades is lifting a curse of its own: 17 years after the game was first released on the Nintendo Wii as Muramasa: The Demon Blade, it's somehow the first release from Vanillaware to make it to PC. The Japanese studio followed Muramasa with more nuanced games, like 2019's acclaimed 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim and 2024 tactics RPG Unicorn Overlord, but after playing Muramasa on PC I can see why the studio started here. I remember a hack-and-slash with art so lavish seeming novel back in 2009, and somehow that's just as true today.
The painterly art has a timeless quality to it, though that's something of an illusion. "It was a lot of work, and it was very difficult," Nakanishi said, laughing. "We had some of the assets, but not others. For those we had to pull them from the game, and then artists individually by hand had to touch them up and recreate them to make something appropriate for the HD release. But you know, through that arduous hand-drawn process, we were able to create this warm and colorful art that we think people will be happy to see."
Revenant Blades is also not the simplistic game I remember. The skill system for all 108 blades is new, allowing me to equip three ground and three air abilities to a trio of blades I could have equipped (and swap between) at any one time. That made for a dizzying number of special moves to keep in mind, though executing them is as simple as tapping a button and a direction.
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