This week's comic is based on Muramasa the Demon Blade for the Nintendo Wii which was developed by Vanillaware from Odin Sphere and Princess Crown fame. Unlike most of Vanillaware's other titles that have an old European feel, Muramasa the Demon blade is heavily saturated in Japanese culture and mythology.

Muramasa is a fast-paced action side-scroller sporting beautiful artistic style and animation, accompanied with simple controls and fun fluid gameplay. Though the basic play mechanics may be simple, it gets really fun and addicting due to having fast free-feeling mobility and the option to switch between three swords you have on hand on the fly; allowing the player to develop techniques and a gameplay style best for them to juggle and combo their adversaries to death. There are 108 attainable swords in the game, each with their own unleashable special move. They also fall into two categories, long blades that swing slower but with big burst damage, and short blades which are meant for fast combos.

There are two main character stories you can follow and three difficulty play styles. The first mode leans more on basic RPG mechanics where you rely on levels to power you up while the second leans less on levels and more on raw skill. The third mode is an extra hard mode only attainable by beating the game where you only have 1 health point that never increases apparently. XD

This week's LiA comic follows the female protagonist of the game, Momohime who is haunted and possessed by an (evil?) spirit named Jinkuro. We've only played probably a little more than seven hours of her story, but I'm pretty sure she doesn't have any sword skill of her own. Jinkuro possesses Momohime's body and uses it to battle and journey on his quest. Once in a while you'll run into a monkey on the field who will take you to a hot spring where you can refill your health. A little suspicious, don't you think? Why would he want you to follow him there and what does the monkey get out of it? It's not like he's an acquaintance of the protagonists beforehand either. XD

I wanted to take this opportunity to announce that we will be starting a Kickstarter project in the very near future. If you have checked the site within the last month or have been following us through Twitter and Facebook, you may notice that we have a couple of T-Shirt designs that we are looking forward to offering up! Pie and I have been very excited and anxious to get to the production stage, but this is where we are going to need to you, our beloved readers, for your support in going forward.

For the last 15 months, we've been working on the comic for free as a simple labor of love. We weren't sure how well the comics would be received or even if we could keep up with the pace. We did have a donation button on the site, but it wasn't being used and I didn't feel comfortable asking for simple donations, so I took it down at the start of the year. We started advertising on the site about 7-months ago and to date we've earned enough to buy a couple pizzas with it hehe.

It's to be expected though because we are, after all, fighting an uphill battle. We came into this with no real solid connections with the art and comic communities and so most of you found out about us from word of mouth, Deviant Art or through comics being featured on sites like Joystiq. Again though, this was to our benefit because it helped us get into our groove and go through the necessary growing pains.

Anyways, I wrote a rather lengthy background about our thoughts, expectations and even fears going into this, and those of you interested in getting to know us better can check it out on the coming Wednesday's Bonus Stage, which will be complete with a comic! (holy crap, finally a comic for the bonus stage, right!?).

Thanks, as always, for your readership and support!