Whether it's the cute character designs, expressive voice acting, or the amazing music, Brave Fencer Musashi just oozes charm in all the right places. Add to this some light RPG elements such as stats that level up as you play, new abilities to gain and solve puzzles with, an inventory system, a full village of people to chat with throughout the adventure, and you have yourself an adorable and cozy late 90s journey that you'll surley never forget.

And this would be the case, if not for the bafflingly incoherent level design that seemingly exists to misdirect the player. It is done in such a peculiar way as well to suggest the developers didn't know how to make the levels engaging and fun, or they were intentionally seeking to extend the play time by making sure players would consistently get stuck, confused, or otherwise lost.

One simple example is an early mountain area where you need to cross a river. You'd think you could just run across a rail sticking above the water but no, you clip through it into the water every attempt. You instead need to jump onto some poles in the water in an area where you could have easily missed them. The poles show up earlier in the area but are off to the side where they are difficult to reach via jumping and are otherwise easily missable. Good, standard level design would probably place these poles in the critical path of progression so the player won't miss them and will now know to look for them forward. It's weird they were kept to the side in such an avoidable way, and that the obvious looking rail in the water positioned visibly between two sides of the river actually has no colision at all. It gives the impression that the level design process for the game was chaotic at best.

In addition, the physics are also at times very fustrating to deal with, making some platforming and other segments a lot more obnoxious than they probably were intended to be. Other parts feel like mini-games seemingly there to draw out the run time as you are under pressure to coordinate a stressful sequence with a strict time limit and multiple obstacles intended to slow you down. As a Squaresoft title, it brought to mind a collage of memories around every clunky, poorly executed PS1-2 era Final Fantasy mini game.

Brave Fencer Musashi really helped reinforce for me where 90s Squaresoft's strengths and weaknesses were. They had some great music, great art, great character designs, fun if a bit confusing writing localization, and then abysmal level designs and physics programming.

I'd like to conclude by adding that calling someone "pal" while using a snarky, sarcastic tone is a really underrated gem of 90s culture, and we need to bring it back.