‘Ugh! A fly!! This is what you get for what you did to my father!’
Although in the grand scheme of things gaming is a luxury, I am glad I was born when I was. Getting to grow up with the classics from the Atari era on was a treat, in part because I could never predict quite how much I could put all of that experience to good use in a career that’s now spanned a decade. But when I’m not working, I’m typically messing around with games both old and new — a list that includes a hell of a lot of PS1 and PS2 classics.
You ever take part in an innocuous conversation that suddenly transforms your day, week, or even month? That’s what I got from this comment by reader Smo5000, who annually pleads Square Enix for a Brave Fencer Musashi PSN port. It was enough for me to boot up the 1998 action RPG again on my old PSOne, and my God it was even better than I remembered it.
Even the smallest interaction is a celebration of weird. Nearly every member of the cast, from the lazy ass Mayor and his loving spouse to the unsettling priest, is an actual character in every sense of the phrase. You really get to know these people despite the fact that they could have easily been throwaway NPCs, and the clever day and night cycle combined with Kirby-esque absorption system rife with experimentation augment Musashi so that it’s actually fun to play.
No grand thesis here — this is just a little interlude I felt like sharing, sparked unwittingly at the behest of a community member. Maybe someone will be inspired to give this gem a go before Square Enix wises up and unleashes its greatness into the world in digital form.
