The Mysterious Murasame Castle - Aosame Castle | Part 1

Описание: This is The Mysterious Murasame Castle for the JP-only Famicom Disk System (Japanese NES with an official floppy disk loader addon), which is essentially a more linear Zelda 1 on steroids. This game plays a lot like Zelda 1 with a top-down view on multiple rooms of areas on the map you can visit, but has far more fast-paced combat with enemies and projectiles swarming the screen from all sides, and it can really turn into a bullet hell quick or even cause the game itself to lag from the amount of stuff onscreen. This is the game that inspired Samurai Warriors 3’s Murasame Castle Mode and is also where Takamaru came from. I won’t be abusing save states or things like that here unless the game doesn’t save properly (which does happen near the end of the game, heh).

And since this game shares similarities to Zelda 1, it also shares its jankiness in movements and combat. I hated the jankiness of Zelda 1 when I played it, and it's kind of similarly janky here with you only able to move and attack in 4 directions while enemies come from all directions. Great.

This game is also absolutely relentless with its difficulty, and is the one game that I’d say doesn’t care much about its game balance or fairness much. I’d also say that it requires more luck than skill to beat this game because the hitboxes and enemy patterns are a complete mess. Enemies and projectiles swarm the screen a lot and in random manners, and I think this game’s difficulty really just comes from its annoyance most of the time. This game is also far harder than Zelda 1 because you only have 3 HP maximum and 3 lives throughout the entire game, and boy do they go down fast. Your post-hit i-frame lasts for 1 millisecond, so you can get hit multiple times in succession and just die quickly in some situations. Combining these with the janky controls made for an overall miserable experience for me. Let me just say that I ended up hating this game by the time I finished it.

Anyway, Takamaru is on a journey to kill the evil Murasame or something while the whole world tries to kill him, including other ninjas. The overall theme here is a lot less demonic compared to in Samurai Warriors 3, and most of the enemies here look like normal humans. Aosame here also isn’t ice-themed in any way. Each area in this game is separated into two segments: the castle town section and the castle interior.

The game is overall more linear than Zelda 1, where you simply have to move from point A to point B in every stage, while defeating required enemies on the way or a boss at the end. Despite being more linear, the maps still have a bunch of branching paths that can lead to either the same destinations or just dead ends. There are a couple of items you can pick up by either breaking moving tanuki statues or hidden gift boxes on the map, such as different projectiles, projectile enhancements (shogi pieces with different kanjis) that increase the amounts fired at once, a pair of red shoes for increasing movement speed, blue shoes for walking on water without slowing down, and some white box thing for a full-heal. Takamaru can either throw ranged weapons, or automatically switch to using sword slashes when there are close targets. The sword can one-shot most enemies and deflect some projectiles, but it cannot damage bosses and has a weird hitbox that may or may not hit enemies or projectiles around you. It also jams quite often for some reason, so sometimes you’d press the button and it won’t come out. Awesome.

For special items, you start each session with an invisibility sub-weapon. It renders Takamaru invisible and invincible for around three seconds, which is incredibly useful for dealing with crowds of enemies and projectiles. It can be used for up to three times before vanishing, but you can only use the sword in its duration. And since bosses are immune to the sword, you unfortunately cannot cheese bosses with it.

The outer area of Aosame is fairly simple and not too difficult, being the first area of the game. You just walk through hordes of ninjas who throw shurikens at you and a couple of big guys who can toss bombs that explode for some hit range. The interior area features some samurai dudes who can block your projectiles with their swords, but will raise their swords and leave themselves open when you approach them. There are also a couple of princesses you can rescue in the castles that will award you with points for extra lives, but some of them will turn into demon masks when approached and will freaking chase you throughout the entire stage and are really tanky to kill. Lord Aosame here tosses four bombs in quick succession at you and can block your projectiles with them, which makes it incredibly annoying for hitting him without taking hits from the bombs. He also has a pretty small hitbox here compared to his sprite. Running around and hoping my projectiles hit was the only thing I could do to win really.