This game has been a long time coming. It looked brilliant during the reveal. Cherry blossoms, lush landscapes and a swordsman locked in battle. What’s not to love? The game did not disappoint so far.

Gameplay is fun but challenging. You really feel like a swordsman. Enemies are difficult and will easily murder you and decapitate if you let your guard down or get too overconfident. It is extremely easy to die. The game is not unfair however. Any death once I learned the controls was demonstrably my fault. Either I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings, was going on the offence too readily or just simply let my guard down.

A nice benefit as compared to say Souls-games is that when you achieve a kill you gain some resolve and can recover your HP. This means its not the end of the world should be within a millilitre of your life after beating an enemy, and still have 5 other mongols surrounding you waiting their turn.

Graphically the game is gorgeous. It is so far mostly forests and trees, and small Japanese settlements. For such an environment though, I don’t feel like it’s just a copy pasted forest either. Grass and leaves move as you’d expect. A nice touch that I am beginning to appreciate with the later games of this generation.

I am looking forward to playing more of this game.