Review — Onimusha: Warlords. Onimusha: Warlords is a remaster of the…
By: Dirk Buelens
Tags: Gaming, Review, Games, Videogames, Japanese

Onimusha: Warlords is a remaster of the first entry of the Onimusha series, first released in 2001 for Playstation 2. Now, eighteen years later, Capcom saw it fit to re-release the classic semi-survival and horror, semi-samurai simulator that touches on the spiritual realm game for the new generation consoles. But can a game that is almost two decades old compare to what gamers are used to nowadays?

The beginning of the end

The game is set in the Sengoku period and starts of with an alternative take on the famous battle of Okehazama. The main character Samanosuke Akechi, who is part of the forces fighting against Nobunaga Oda, is seen overlooking the battlefield while he is being attacked. The warlord Nobunaga Oda scores an unexpected victory, but is killed shortly after. About a year later, Samanosuke receives a letter from princess Yuki, asking him to help her fight off a demon threat, supported by a supposedly resurrected Nobunaga. Samanosuke and his female kunoichi friend Kaede arrive at the castle, however they are too late to prevent princess Yuki from being abducted by demons. The duo sets out on a quest to save the princess, and by extend the world.

Onimusha: Warlords actually looks a lot like a reskinned Resident Evil game, Capcom’s most successful series to date. The game does not feature an open world environment, but is composed of interconnected static screens. When you reach the edge of a screen, the camera abruptly shifts to the next screen. This means that you could be walking towards the back of a landscape, only to have your character appear somewhere out of the side of your screen. While this approach may have worked to create an unsettling and creepy atmosphere, and to give players the feeling that dangers could lurk around any corner, this mechanic mostly induces frustration in me nowadays. Having the screen constantly shift while figuring out where to go had me curse out loud a couple of times.

Up those grades

There is no such thing as levelling up your character, but you do get the opportunity to level up your sword and collect additional ones. The first few stages of the game sees you taking control of Samanosuke, with only his katana by his side. This proves to be severely insufficient in dealing with large demons, as is proven not long into the story. In trying to save princess Yuki, Samanosuke is beaten to the brink of death by a monstrous ogre-like demon. In a vision, Samanosuke is visited by the spirits of twelve oni, who grant him the power over a mysterious gauntlet. This gauntlet allows him to absorb the souls of his fallen enemies. These souls can then be used to upgrade one of three magic weapons that can be acquired, Raizan, Enryuu and Shippu, with each of these providing an elemental attack, like thunder or fire.

Its not all about combat though. Onimusha: Warlords combines its action scenes — which can be pretty stress-inducing as you try to figure out an enemy’s attack pattern — with puzzle sections. You’ll often encounter multiple areas without enemies, but each having its own puzzle to solve. This can range from opening a lock by moving tiles around, to walking on pressure plates in the ground in order to open up a path to the next room. Some of these puzzles can get pretty frustrating as well, and the game can be extremely unforgiving. One specific section sees Samanosuke locked in a room that is slowly filling with water. In order to free him, Kaede has to find the solution to a puzzle. As if this puzzle wasn’t stressful enough, you can see a bar on the side of your screen slowly filling up, indicating Samanosuke is getting in real danger…

And what if you screw up? You’ll have to start from your last save point. Indeed, back in 2001, games relied on fixed save points strewn around the game map. You had to interact with these points, some of which could be quite far away from each other, in order to save your progress. Your character dies? Back to the last save point. Gamers are spoiled nowadays with constant auto-saving and checkpoints around every corner. And to top it off, Onimusha: Warlords doesn’t let you skip through cutscenes. It also doesn’t help that the game’s stiff character animations haven’t aged well and have not been upgraded in the slightest.

The verdict

It’s sad to say that Onimusha: Warlords hasn’t aged well, and the remaster hasn’t done enough to revitalize it. The “updated graphics” really don’t do the game much service. The character animations are still stiff, and the cutscenes that were jaw-dropping in 2001 are cringe-inducing in 2019. The games was a tremendous success back then, and it seemed only logical for Capcom to allow people to play it on their new systems. But the game is nothing more than a trip down nostalgia lane. Everything feels slow, everything looks terrible, but it does provide a look into the past, and access to what was once considered one of the best games ever. This is what great games used to look like back then. But does that justify dishing out €20 for it today? I’m not sure about that.

3/5

Reviewed for PlayStation 4