Marvelous Entertainment has released a new gameplay trailer for Muramasa Rebirth, the PlayStation Vita version of the 2009 Wii title Muramasa: The Demon Blade. As anyone familiar with Vanillaware’s George Kamitani (the man behind the PS2 classic Odin Sphere) could probably guess, the game’s hand drawn sprite designs and animations look incredible running on the Vita’s OLED screen.
Honestly, there is really not much new to see in this video and it is noticeably shorter than the Muramasa Rebirth debut trailer that was released last month. With that said, we have not really heard much (or anything to be exact) from Aksys Games since their announcement that they would be handling the North American release of Muramasa, so we kind of have to take what we can get at this point.
At any rate, I’m incredibly excited that Muramasa Rebirth is actually getting released in the West. The Demon Blade is easily one of my favorite third-party games that was released on the Wii, and ranks high up on my all-time favorite games list. The title didn’t exactly light up the U.S. sales charts on the Wii, so it’s nice that it is getting a second chance to find a Western audience. My hope is that it pulls in some decent numbers and somebody gets the bright idea for a PS3 port, because I sure would love to see those beautiful sprites running in full HD.
Currently Marvelous Entertainment is planning to launch the Japanese version of Muramasa: The Demon Blade on March 28, 2013. Sadly, Aksys Games is still holding out on revealing a release date for North America. Considering the swiftness that Japanese launch date is closing in, and the fact that we have yet to seen any Western promotion, I’m expecting Muramasa Rebirth will hit our shores well after March 28th. We will keep an eye out for any confirmation of that and keep you updated.