Square Enix Showing PS2 Musashi Sequel By David Smith 5/10/2004
While Square Enix announced almost all of its lineup prior to E3, its under-construction E3 display features one more game left to unveil. A rolling trailer features Samurai Legend Musashi, a PlayStation 2 sequel to the quirky PlayStation action-RPG Brave Fencer Musashi.
The PS2 sequel features a redesigned hero with baggy pants, a tight tank top, twin swords, and if you could imagine such after checking out the original Tetsuya Nomura-designed Musashi, even bigger hair. The 21st-century Musashi looks a little less traditional and a lot more attitudinal than his 32-bit ancestor.
His game looks a fair bit more impressive as well, with sharply outlined toon-shaded graphics accentuating Nomura's character designs (though he hasn't been officially confirmed as the artist behind the new game, his stamp is all over both the heroes and monsters). The trailer features many environments far larger than what we saw in the first Musashi, with more of a Jak II scale to the bigger areas. Musashi's battles include some cool feats of character animation, meanwhile, like an enemy suddenly transmuting to burning ash, which blows away leaving his skeleton behind.
We'll have more details on Samurai Legend Musashi from Square Enix's press conference later tonight. Look forward to it.