NINJA GAIDEN Σ

The Wooden Sword is a weapon that can be bought from Muramasa or obtained as a scarab reward, depending on the diffculty level. It costs 500 Essence, and the 6 levels of upgrades for it cost 3k, 5k, 10k, 20k, 30k and finally 40k, for the grand total of 108k essence. As the Wooden Sword, it is pretty useless, having very low damage and being incapable of a lot of useful techniques. Once you fully upgrade it though,it becomes the UF and that is the best of the heavy weapons, even without the scaling low health damage.

For the 1k kills, get yourself the UF and use it for a lot of the late game combat over your playthroughs. This, combined with using it where available in Mission Mode should get you the required number of kills. On higher diffculties, the UF becomes a lot more useful to have from earlier in the game, so if you aim to beat the game on Master Ninja, it makes less sense to try and grind this out. A good place to grind it out however, would be the Stairway to the Imperial Palace, as there is not only a kill challenge here, but the fiends respawn every time you enter and leave again, with a Save Point in an adjacent area and Muramasa not far away in Tairon