I was fortunate enough to pick up Musashi earlier this weekend but unfortunately have only really had time to put in a couple of hours. So far I am really enjoying myself. Surprisingly the game seems to have more in common with it's predecessor than I imagined it having. The battles seem very familiar in feel, the environments are reminiscient of Brave Fencer, and I got a wave of nostalgia from freeing some of the town NPCs from energy fields scattered around. The graphics are flat out beautiful, the cell shading and anime outlining looks awesome on screen and in play, I'm glad they chose such an original shot at it. The opening anime sequence that Gainax did for them is also great to watch. I'm really digging the whole NPC "carrying" implementation, I think it's funny and well done, makes for some good gameplay. Other than that I've noticed that the game seems slightly faster paced than I remember, which is a good thing because I was dreading it being slow and uninteresting.

On the downside Musashi's voice has went from "bad but funny" to "downright godawful", the other NPCs voices also aren't too great, but in comparison to Musashi's unbelivably bad voice they don't sound all that bad. Also, so far this game doesn't seem to have as good of a story or character development as Brave Fencer, however, perhaps I haven't played enough of the game to say so just yet. I'll let you know how it goes when I put some more hours in after school today. I hope to hear the reactions from all of you soon as well.