One of the best things about eating at McDonalds is not thinking about it. If you really take a moment and contemplate everything that goes into fast food – exploitative working conditions, factory farms that are nightmarish in quality, and that movie with Michael Keaton – you’d turn around and walk out and possibly straight into the ocean. Instead, you simply turn off your brain and wolf down some fries that legitimately were better thirty years ago and a cheeseburger that could double as insulation in a pinch. The point is, it’s quick and enjoyable, which is how to consume any number of things that are inherently bad for you. Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade, is a fantastic little game for mindless enjoyment, but you really don’t need to dive deeper unless you want to crack your head on the pool floor.

Oh cool, a therapy session inside a video game. Wait, is this a cozy cafe simulator??

The story of Yasha centers around the character Shigure, who apparently is a legendary Okami that was born into the vessel of a young girl. Depending on the player character you decide at the beginning, the angles and optics all take different approaches. Playing as Shigure lets you see the tale unfold from the vantage of someone cursed to combat a fate she has no part in choosing. Sara, the disavowed demon, initially wants to capture Shigure to get back into Hell’s good graces, but ends up both learning and teaching some important lessons about being a failure. The last character, Taketora, is a muscular, anthropomorphic tiger who protects Shigure with his life and may also exist in a separate reality from the other two story lines, which, to be fair, are polar opposites of each other.

Before we dive into this Hades inspired title, let me just state that I couldn’t fully understand the storyline, so my deepest apologies if I’ve conflated or mixed up the way things are playing out. Like Hades, you need to play multiple times until you get the full tale, and, frankly, each character’s path has its own yarn that seems to go on and on in tangential but different directions. Shigure, who I view as the “primary” storyline, follows a multi-chapter arc of revelation, despair and redemption. Sara the demon is something similar but with totally different, sometimes inappropriate beats, like a musical in the middle of trying to come to terms with identifying “who” you are. As for Taketora, his dedication to trying to save Shigure and protect her from the world around her never really falters, but also makes it the weakest of the throughlines.

Actual quote that explains why I have a hard time sharing my Fritos.

If you’ve come here purely for the story, I need to tell you that Yasha doesn’t deliver in the capacity you may be expecting. The development team of 7Quark is very clear that the stories are all separate with some overlapping characters, but not storylines. Everything is told in clips and phrases, but there isn’t really development from the side characters or bosses like you might see in another title of this genre. You basically need to play through the “run” of the game, and you’ll get a bit more exposition the further along you get, but it’s always focused on either your chosen protagonist or the big-bad of the tale. If you’re hoping for a lot more about Shigure’s protector friend or everyone’s life before or after, you’re out of luck.

Alright, down to the brass tacks of it all. An isometric action RPG, Yasha compels you to fight through multiple rooms and stages in order to reach the final boss, usually the infamous Nine Tailed Fox, where the run will be finished and things will be reset, with some changes to the difficulty and boss spawns. The levels aren’t random: you’ll always have the same pattern of rooms, bosses and recovery areas, and the mobs will spawn in almost the same spots. One you get down the patterning for both which rooms you encounter and the areas where enemies will appear, you can start developing attack plans and formulas that’ll get your runs down to almost half of your initial time.

Of course there’s a giant crab boss, didn’t you see the word “Japan” somewhere in the review?

The three heroes all have different approaches, with Shigure being your standard sword heroine with medium strength, Sara as the faster but weaker dashing character, and Taketora as a seriously unbalanced heavy who can do range and melee. Interestingly, all three characters are wildly overpowered, but in their own ways. Shigure takes a moment for you to get your footing, but her strikes can easily level most enemies in a couple of blows once you get some incremental upgrades. Sara has the hardest starting foot, but her weapon upgrades completely overpower enemies from the get-go. Taketora, by comparison, starts out the most godlike, but gradually balances with the world around him as enemies slowly increase in strength over the subsequent runs.

There were things that I really appreciated about Yasha. First and foremost, it runs like a dream on the Nintendo Switch, which is pivotal for face paced action like this. Once you get into a realm, there’s really no slowing down as you dash, strike and parry with the best of them. If you can keep track of yourself, the frenetic energy keeps you moving from the word go, and the memorization of where enemies pop up allows you to angle and start the sequence again and again with pinpoint, deadly accuracy. There’s nothing like seeing the spawn circles appear and then mercing a foe within a split second of tangibility. That’s the sort of bullshit damage that I like seeing, and the powercreep factor of weapons and abilities keeps everyone in line.

I’m gonna stomp this beast with the power of traditional New Year’s games.

Additionally, the upgrade system (again, very Hades adjacent) lets you prioritize how you’ll be improving yourself as time goes by. You can add passive traits like better item drops, higher base damage or increased HP, but you can also attune to character specific upgrades that fit their play style. Taketora, for example, lets you add a hefty boost to his charged arrow attack if you’re willing to save up the soul points (the currency for upgrades), whereas Sara adds a ridiculous movement speed bonus to an already overly fast lead. The development team knew how to identify what makes each character special and lean into that with improvements that play to their strengths rather than round them out entirely.

And the weapons of Yasha, while a bit restrictive in style, give some great specificity in how the gameplay can load out. You can mix and match weapons, so Shigure can wield two swords with different benefits and restrictions simultaneously, toggling with a single shoulder button. Which means setting up a ton of cherry blossom explosives and triggering them with a flaming ring that bursts around her, should the moment strike. Or, one of my favorite combinations, Sara will cover the playing field with edible dango that might give her a shield buff while also kicking around ricocheting shuttlecocks that do absurd amounts of damage. It’s a silliness that also has a strength that’s undeniably impressive when it all lines up.

In full gremlin mode, Sara is just lighting everything on fire as she runs around. It’s perfect.

Not to mention the world of Yasha is well conceived in how the improvements are handled. The safe rooms after bosses and between longer levels give you certain chance upgrades, but not always and not all the time. The bowls of ramen you obtain add some great passive stats but can only be applied one at a time, overwriting previous meals if you buy another. The omori that can slightly improve or vastly improve (with a detrimental caveat) appear constantly, and you can hold a metric ton of them. The challenge missions fluctuate from easy (don’t get touched by lumbering enemies for 30 seconds) to somewhat challenging (fight two bosses at the same time) to asinine (don’t get murdered by the penultimate boss in the middle of a rampage). At least the healing hot springs appear each and every time.

The only difficulty I found with Yasha is that you can get burned out very quickly if you’re not careful. Because the runs are shorter than other games that ape this style, I could easily get from start to finish in about fifteen minutes, and that was long before the final chapter and the resolution was achieved (which, of course, just opened up the incentive for constant reruns and increased difficulty). Once I started to plateau in what to expect, I lost interest in the buildup. Sure, it was pretty fun to reach a point where unlocking and finding new, absurd damage caps was fun, but prior to that I started to get bored with the sameness. You’d be surprised how fast the power fantasy gets old when nothing massive appears outside of exposition and the boss reveals.

“Kay, I’m off to argue with weebs on how I’m not Shinobu from Demon Slayer, byeeee!”

Thankfully, that’s why multiple save files are important and should be exercised. Give yourself the freedom to explore and experiment with the different characters as your mood shifts. Don’t just keep doing Sara runs because you’re successful, add some variety and see how well you and Tiger Daddy can get along when the stakes aren’t so high. It’s a good change of pace that doesn’t completely rewrite the formula: it lets you see and do things from a new perspective, and that can make all the difference. 

I think I really enjoyed Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade because I didn’t spend a lot of time chasing the next Hades clone after the success of the progenitor. There have been attempts, but I missed them, and I didn’t get into the sequel early access yet. So something that reminds me that isometric, fast paced, incrementally improving titles are fun as hell is important, and Yasha hits those notes with aplomb. It’s a bit convoluted, it can be atonal at times, and the voicework is sparse, but it works,and it works really well. Fans looking to put their fingers to work on some speedster striking should definitely pick this up, and be sure to invest in button caps: you’re going to need them.

Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade was provided by the publisher.