Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade Review – Edo’s Epic Blade Ballet

by Jim Smale · May 16, 2025

Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade review – Step into the Edo period where chaos reigns and demons lurk in the shadows. Wield mystical blades, uncover hidden truths, and carve your path through a roguelite adventure steeped in Japanese folklore.

Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade Review Pros

Awesome graphics.
2.30GB download size.
Platinum trophy.
You can remap the controls.
Three playable characters – Shigure, Sara, and Taketora. Each has unique abilities and fighting styles.
Fast loading times.
Text and character interactions can be set to auto-play, skipped, fast-forwarded, or read line by line.
A coop opening Anime scene that looks like a TV show.
Opening the tutorial section, but you get video pop-ups as you play.
Action roguelike gameplay.
A beautiful 3D isometric game world.
Combat is fast and furious with many combos, party dodges, and abilities to learn.
I found the combat was almost rhythmic.
Enemies drop level-up orbs, where you choose one of three random upgrades to your character. This happens after clearing out all enemies in the given area.
You can pause the game.
The game flow is split up into rooms or arenas of your liking, and you need to take everyone out to advance.
Cat shrines appear on your journey, and interacting with these gives a random reward.
Your health is persistent across all rooms and arenas.
Soul power is collected from enemies and is the persistent item you keep even after death.
Spend Soul power on levelling up your character permanently.
Whether you die or live, the end of a run will show what gear you had in you, any amulet collected, and your clear times and best clear time, along with the highest difficulty achieved. And it records EVERY run.
After a run, you go through several places in a Central hub town, where you spend Soul powers, interact with characters, unlock new amenities, and check runs and scores.
It’s a bright and vibrant game that oozes accessible and satisfying combat and character development.
Collect resources and materials to craft new weapons and gear. Each piece of gear and weapons have its own buffs and passives attached to it.
Bi,g massive boss encounters.
The equipment box in town lets you change out your items, gear, and weapons.
A full 3D viewer for gear and weapons.
Combat is fast, but you can hold back and use the arts to do these powerful counterattacks, but they require precision timing.
Find hidden realm challenges with special modifiers and conditions. Completing it gives huge rewards, but failing it cuts your health in half.
Discover towns with shops on your travels.
Finding an amulet lets you pick one of two options for your run: blessing or forbidden. One is all good, and one is good but also has something bad, like attacks do more, but so do the enemies.
Weapon abilities are generally the same in that the bar in the corner fills u,p and then once full, the ability comes out.
Demon blades are drops from bosses, and these are needed to unlock new weapons.
You can carry two weapons (character dependent) and swap between them with a button press.
A practice dummy in town lets you see damage numbers and try out weapons.
Every run can be unique.
Meals can be bought when on the run, and they vary in price as they give shields, buffs, etc.
Every weapon looks the same, but the abilities and attacks are incredibly varied and look cool with all the elements countering other elements, etc.
The game is a visual treat and a solid roguelike.
You can swap weapons mid-combo, and let me tell you it looks real good, but also does mega damage against the right enemy.
Find vegetables from enemies and give them to a seller in tow, and that will level up the ingredients and make new dishes for you to buy.
Pick the same upgrade choice, and it levels up that upgrade to improve it.
You can rewatch any unlocked cutscenes from the main menu.

Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade Review Cons

Huge story dumps at the start of the game.
No actual game settings.
The game doesn’t offer any accessibility options like Colourblind or bigger parry wi does etc.
Starting a new run is not that appealing until you get a lot further in the game; enemies might be randomized, but you still hit the same story beats each time.
Boss fights are either really clever and fun, too easy, or they are drawn-out bullet sponges.
I wish you could freely swap between characters in town from the start.
The game is quick to get you to a point where you can easily do a few bosses, but then it kind of stagnates, and progress is slow.
The town is actually quite a boring place, and you just get a route to do everything you need to do.
At a certain point, the returns were not worth the effort, and I found the runs to just be the same, and the whole loop just grew stale and put me off.