Muramasa Sengo was a legendary swordsmith, alive during the Sengoku period of Japanese history. Chances are that if you have played video games for long enough, you have come across his name. He and/or his swords have made appearances in numerous video game titles, including mainstays such as Ninja Gaiden, Final Fantasy, and Castlevania.

Unfortunately, most of these titles have evoked the Muramasa name lightly. Sure, Muramasa was a master swordsmith, and games typically recognize him for this, just as Final Fantasy III rewards the Muramasa blade as the ultimate weapon for the ninja class, but that's only half of the legend.

Most geniuses are notorious for their eccentricities, and Muramasa Sengo was notorious for being a violent, delirious, and altogether unpleasant man. This perception, combined with a series of misfortunes involving the Tokugawa clan, contributes to the more sinister side of the legend.

It is said many members of this family were killed by Muramasa blades, either in battle or in ritual suicide. The last straw came when shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu accidentally wounded himself with one. He banned any sword made by the Muramasa school.

Consequently, many superstitions regarding his blades were formed. Facts and rumors were distilled through literature and performing arts into the legend as it stands today. Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka's short film Muramasa (1987) illustrates the legend well.

In it, a samurai discovers a cursed blade, which has great power, but he is unable to control the power, leading to much needless bloodshed and, eventually, his suicide at the hand of the blade. The story exemplifies a precedent on exchanging vitality for strength. But this concept is not exclusive to Japanese folklore. It can be found in many places -- such as in video games.

Side Effects May Include Suicidal Thoughts

It's a longstanding tradition for players to be asked to intentionally harm their on-screen representation in order to win. A recent and relevant example of such virtual mortification is found in Vanillaware's Muramasa: The Demon Blade, which tidily ties together Japanese myth and video game tradition. The game allows the player to equip their avatar with three Muramasas, but each sword will break if too many special attacks are performed.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade

And battles are tough, requiring special attacks to be used frequently. Breaking all three swords is a real possibility, and, without an adequate way to attack and defend, defeat is too. In effect, the game tells the player to kill a bunch of enemies, but be careful how you do it, or you'll kill yourself in the process.

At heart, this resembles the legend of Muramasa blades: how they grant their wielders great power, but can require of them their life in return. But what advantage does this principle offer players? Surely such malice is an ill-seeded trope dreamt up by draconic game designers solely to annoy unsuspecting gamers. Or could this bad medicine be a case of tough love, ultimately leading to a more diverse and interesting experience? The answer is... well, it depends.

Pick Your Poison

A lot of games that employ a suicide button just don't have the player's best interest in mind. They tend to serve some ulterior motive other than enriching the experience.

Final Fight

The traditional knock-everything-down special attacks found in most brawlers, such as Haggar's spinning lariat in Final Fight, will hopefully rot in their arcade graveyard. These moves knock back the throngs of thugs that will surround you, but deduct a fixed amount of health each time. Given the pay-to-play nature of arcade games, this makes the game designers out as the real criminals, enforcing rules that serve only one practical purpose: to make you poorer.

Likewise, the turbo/fatigue dynamic in sports games is an unnecessary relic. Its intent is to make the experience more realistic, but not always more enjoyable. These types of Muramasa devices seem to overlay the structure of the design, rather than being an integral, organic cog of it. They have little relevance.

Another type of Muramasa is the "Participation Is Optional" kind. These allow the player to opt in to benefits, but face penalties for doing so. They somewhat improve the game for experienced players by allowing them to choose a high risk/high reward strategy. For instance, the Masamune is one of the strongest swords in Symphony of the Night, but equipping it greatly reduces defensive statistics.

Similarly, the Thornlet/Bone Mail/Cursed Ring combination is your strongest defensive option in Final Fantasy V, but your health will gradually deplete, you won't be able to resurrect yourself if you die, and you'll only have 60 seconds to win a battle before instantly dying.

Then there are self-destruct commands like Recarmdra in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, where a player can sacrifice a party member in exchange for restoring the rest of the party's health and magic points. These types of suicide mechanics have some relevance to the design and can increase the value of a game for those who care to use them, but you can take them or leave them (literally).

These examples utilize Muramasa concepts to an extent, but to really understand the advantages of self-injury, it's best to look at systems in which these practices are fully integrated. The types of systems found in games like Muramasa: The Demon Blade require players to pay at the door.

There's no way around it. Either vitality is to be sacrificed for attack power, or vice versa. This at first may seem like a detriment, but can, in fact, improve the gaming experience by offering multiple ways any given scenario can play out, instead of the same, de facto situation every time.

A Deal with the Devil

In Muramasa: The Demon Blade, players wield a two-edged sword. On one hand, it's dangerous to show too much reservation in attacking. On the other hand, it's equally dangerous to play too aggressively. Because of this, the same battle can yield a multitude of situations.

Say a player is ambushed by an Oni, overreacts by spamming away all his attack power, then dies because he is left defenseless. The player is sent a few screens back and wanders from left to right again, only to stumble into the exact same battle.

Aware of his previous folly, he attempts to slay the demon while preserving his attack power, but he overcompensates and fails again, this time out of reluctance to weaken himself. Only on his third attempt does the player balance his offensive and defensive strategy in such a way to defeat the Oni.

This hypothetical play session shows how the Muramasa mechanic allows for a greater variety of situations in a scenario. Greater variety means the player has more options. More options give the player more influence in the game, or the illusion of it.

Now you're probably thinking there are plenty of other ways to add variety to a scenario. Why then should a player be subjugated to the seppuku of an archaic mechanic when we have such modern technologies as sandbox environments and complex AI for stimulation?

At this question I would falter if variety were Muramasa's only virtue. But there's more. Variety is merely a tributary of a greater virtue.

The Noble Truth of Suffering

The broader advantage of Muramasa systems is they create a pendulum effect in the games they are used in. In general, the right-hand trajectory of the pendulum represents attack power, and the left-hand trajectory represents self preservation. As the pendulum swings to the right, attack power is plentiful and used accordingly, but upon reaching its ultimate ascension, the pendulum reverses direction, attack power begins to run out, and the player's awareness shifts to self preservation.

A good place to see the pendulum effect in action is Treasure's masochistic import Alien Soldier (1995). Alien Soldier's battle system has a similar rule set to Muramasa: The Demon Blade, but with stricter implementation, leading to a more fulfilling experience. The key differences are that there is no way to melee in order to preserve your metered weapons, and powerful weapons take a long time to regenerate. Also, Alien Soldier is essentially a boss rush.

Alien Soldier

The boss battles in Alien Soldier are similar to those found in Contra or any other run-and-gun shooter of your choosing. The bosses are typically weak to one type of weapon and resist others. Winning involves using the right weapon at the right time and knowing the bosses' patterns, but a pendulum swing can turn your standard pattern-based battles into something much more exciting.

Ideally, the game plan is to go into battle with the proper weapon selected, wait for the right moment, and obliterate your enemy before it has a chance. However, the best laid schemes often go astray. The beauty of the pendulum effect lies in how it constantly turns the tables on the player.

As the player exhausts his best weapon during battle, he must adjust by adopting a more conservative approach. The strategies shift from a full blown offensive to a more defensive position of avoiding attacks while getting in shots where you can. These positions flip once again as attack power is replenished.

William Faulkner once wrote, "I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as he was set on staying still, like it ain't the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping."

The starting and stopping inherent in good Muramasa games prevent players from becoming lazy by frequently asking them to change tactics, just as Alien Soldier asks the player to change between tactics of offense and self preservation. Players must master two playing styles and effectively switch between them to succeed. This provides a great amount of mental stimulation, helping to keep the experience fresh throughout.

Can't Win for Losing

Still, it may seem that Muramasa systems are a means to an end. Level design and enemy placement can deliver the same thing without the negative reinforcement.

The key difference is Muramasa systems put management of the pendulum swing in control of the player instead of the developer. Players are allowed to balance the system whichever way they see fit.

Perhaps Kenta Cho's Torus Trooper presents this balance purest. Torus Trooper is partly similar in design to Tempest. The player moves a cursor along a polygonal surface, dodging and destroying approaching debris. The difference is, in Torus Trooper, the cursor is racing forward to reach checkpoints before time expires, adding an additional layer of depth.

Players must choose when to play conservatively, slowing down and destroying the debris, and when to play liberally, speeding past the debris yet risking a crash.

These two play styles counteract one another. Attack too much and you'll move too slow; move too fast and you'll attack too little. It's a classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Muramasa systems like the one found in Torus Trooper subject the player to gradually constricting thresholds of pain, just as a pendulum will peter out from the influence of gravity. If the player wishes to pass a certain threshold, they must constrict their playing style accordingly.

In this way, these games teach the player how to balance the pendulum of playing style. It's this balancing of two contrasting styles that ultimately makes the idea of self-sacrifice so intriguing.

Flowering Plum and Camellia, screen by Suzuki Kiitsu, c. 1850s (left). Torus Trooper by Kenta Cho (right).

I Hate Myself and Want to Die

Even suicides choose what they see as the better way, and self abusers are, after all, endorphin addicts. Still, a player, who at worst risks the inventory of a virtual avatar, is no less free from his hedonistic ball and chain. Our tendency to move towards pleasure while avoiding pain manifests in the games we play.

This is why the player's first reaction is to speed along the Torus at top speed. When this tactic inevitably fails, their next instinct is to slow down the Trooper and destroy most debris until failure results from this extreme as well.

Players tend to engorge extremes. Once they learn the boundaries of a system, they will exploit them to avoid pain. The boundaries in Torus Trooper and other Muramasa games are a case of diminishing returns. The boundaries are constantly narrowing, requiring the player to become increasingly balanced and decreasingly extreme. This leads the player down a "middle path" towards completing the game.

The idea of a middle path shares these games' Eastern origins. It is an idea common to the teachings of Buddhism. It is the path of the bodhisattva, an existence between extremes which leads to enlightenment. It is one of many ways the influence of Eastern philosophy can be seen in Muramasa-style games. In fact, Buddhism makes a near perfect analogy.

The most obvious comparison is the prevalence of karma in Muramasa systems. The pendulum effect, in which the consequence of an action requires an inverse action, epitomizes the concept. A player's trials with karma often present as much of a challenge as the external obstacles of the game world. Players will find themselves destined to an existence in Samsara unless they realize the aforementioned balance of the middle path.

In Buddhism, the closer one treads to enlightenment, the less they suffer as they decrease bad karma. The same can be said for the middle path in Muramasa style games. The less the pendulum swings, the further players can progress as the game requires more balance and allows less indulgence in extremes. Following this middle path leads to a place beyond existence and its inherent suffering, Buddhahood, or the credit screen; nirvana.

Mahayana

I mention this not to sound like some aloof spiritual idealist, but to show how games have the capacity to encapsulate the beliefs and moral attitudes of society, not just through storytelling and visual representation, but in how we interact with them.

It's no coincidence that most of the games mentioned here originated in the East. Nor is it that the concept of the open world game originated in the West. Games have the ability to represent and comment upon culture just as well as any other medium, and in ways others can't.

As for Muramasa systems in particular, they emulate some important doctrines of Buddhism, in some cases, to the point where the entire scope of the Buddhist lifestyle is optimized to fit on a disc that will play in a box underneath the television. It's likely they offer the games they are found in some benefits analogous to that of following Buddhist tenets.

Whether a fraction of these benefits are passed on outside of the game into the player's life is a claim I am not comfortable in making. But, at the least, players walk away with some conception of a view of the world that is not necessarily their own. That they can gain this from an experience which challenges the body, stimulates the mind, and satisfies the spirit is admirable.