 D- Development team Jorudan took some big swings and misses early on in the Super Nintendo lifespan. They made the role playing game GD Lean which was fairly impressive for the time for its scope and its story but it's absurdly grind heavy and it sure to play. They made the action platformer Zardian which has the feature of switching between 3 transforming mechs throughout each level but the game plays slowly and the user interface often gets in the way. Then they made Alien vs. Predator, the Super Nintendo version, not the arcade game, and uh, yeah, that was a slight disappointment. So keep those games in mind when you think of Musia, the classic Japanese tale of horror. And by that I mean, it has a few things going for it, but it's ultimately disappointing. And that's not unexpected, since this game was released in April of 1992. That was a time when just about every third party Super Nintendo game not made by Capcom and Konami looked and played rough around the edges. The first thing Musia has going for it is its title. The classic Japanese tale of horror signed me up for some of that. And yeah, to the game's credit, the settings and enemy design do look pretty cool. Musia deserves credit for paving away for later games that had horror settings, like Maju Uo, like the second level with these alien egg things everywhere. But that's all the horror is here, just a theme and a story, granted it is a pretty cool story of a beaten down soldier named Imoto who must descend into the abyss to rescue Shizuka, a maiden who holds the talisman that seals off the abyss from the rest of the world. The horror theme doesn't play into the gameplay or anything, this is just a regular old action platformer. You get 3 lives, 2 traverse, 8 levels, there's 16 bars of health per life, and no continues, so that kinda sucks. But there is a password system. You attack with your trusty pike, and there's power ups here and there that can upgrade it like adding a projectile. The A button does a spin attack, the catch being that you have to stand still to use it. B jumps, hold up and jump, and you'll do a floaty super jump, the X button does a clear screen attack, and interestingly the L and R buttons allow you to kinda carefully back away. I never really used this, but it's nice that it's there. Also you earn a new spell after defeating each boss, and it's typical stuff like fireballs and the like. As you can see, this gameplay is slowly. I get the feeling that they were going for a Castlevania vibe with the gameplay, but the control is just too stiff and your character moves too slowly, while the enemies around you are much quicker. In other words, this is one of those games where you're gonna take a lot of damage. If you wanna progress with this one, you gotta take your lumps and just learn to avoid taking more damage than you have to. Yeah, it's pretty lousy, but I wouldn't call this game broken in that regard, it's just annoying. I will say the enemy design here is pretty well done and fits the horror motif. Like these heads that crawl across the ground, is that Heath Ledger's Joker? There's all sorts of Lovecraftian monsters and aliens you gotta contend with, and that goes a long way in keeping this game interesting. The problem is that after level 4, the settings repeat, so there's really only four worlds you travel through, that's a disappointment, but what is here is really cool looking. Unfortunately the music and sound design don't really match the game's visuals, the soundtrack is okay, some tracks are great, but other tracks blast like a foghorn with that painfully early Super Nintendo sound font. When you take damage, you make this goofy muffled grunting sound, plus when you pick up an upgrade, you're treated to a Seinfeld bass slap. Ah yes, you know it's an early Super Nintendo game when you hear that sound. If I could only use one word to describe Musia, it would be rushed. That was my main impression playing through this one, it's like the dev team was under a ton of pressure to get this one finished. So many aspects of this game are good ideas in theory, but they aren't executed very well. I do like how this game looks, I like the enemy design, both in terms of visuals and patterns, but the gameplay is so stiff, the boss battles are a slog, the sound design is terrible, and the music is just annoying. I really can't recommend this one, but I will say, if you're looking for a horror themed 16-bit game, then you should at least try up Musia to see for yourself if the good can outweigh the bad.