Blade Masters is set in a once-peaceful kingdom in which everything has gone terribly wrong; for some reason, the forces of evil are reappearing over the land, destroying all order in the kingdom. The game’s hero, Erik Valdemar, is a young lad who finds himself pursued by evil beasts, and manages to save himself after stumbling across a cursed blade. But the blade comes with a price. It seems that five ruthless "Guardians" are mounting a vicious search for seven mystical blades that can bring them absolute power…and of course, young Erik now has one of them.

Erik’s quest will be played out in a massive 3D environment of fantastic anime-style artwork, and will include over 70 monster and character types, including 20 unique NPCs. Though gamers will be have a choice of five heroes—including, besides Erik, a winsome elf, a sturdy orc, a mountain hermit, and a mysterious knight—they’ll only be able to have three of them in the party at any one time. Ronin claims that its "breakthrough gaming interface means easy-to-use controls of character combat, magic casting and strategic maneuvers," and adding to the ease of play is the game’s 3^rd person perspective and nifty feature of a 360 degree rotating camera view.

Ronin is a also playing up the game’s looks; the game’s graphics will feature more than 5,000 polygons per scene and resolutions of up to 1600 x 1200, as well as multi-texturing effects and dynamic lighting and shadowing techniques. Blademasters will require a 3D card for all these fireworks, and will support all major 3D cards, as well as Aureal A3D sound and new force-feedback mice. And if the single-player game gets old, you can always get into the multiplayer game; Ronin plans to support game networks like mplayer and Heat, and include options for up to five players.

The game’s suggested requirements are a Pentium 233, 64 megs of RAM, an 8x CD-Rom, and a 3D card.

From the screenshots we’ve seen, this looks like it could be a very impressive game; if Ripcord and Ronin follow through and it plays as good as it looks, this could be the game that makes anime-style party-based RPGs as popular on PCs as they are on consoles.