Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny Reviews

Just need part 3 now

It's neat!

After hearing a lot of good things about Onimusha series for decades, but only having played Onimusha 3 (because it had a PC port), I was extremely happy to have finally played Onimusha: Warlords six years ago. It hasn’t aged as good as I have hoped but was still a very cool action adventure hack and slash title that did feel a bit like “Resident Evil with swords” as it was originally intended to be. I was hoping that Capcom would continue with remasters of these titles and it did happen (plus, we’re getting a completely new entry next year). Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny is now also remastered and available on modern platforms. A game I’ve heard good things about… Turns out it’s hot garbage. Let’s start with the positives of the game and the remaster, though. Just like the first entry, the game still uses pre-rendered backgrounds and while that does mean that the intended experience is still 4:3 aspect ratio and playing in 16:9 does make some encounters harder (because you see less), the actual visuals themselves are quite impressive and closer to the level of quality of Resident Evil 0. This remaster also seems to scale quite a bit higher in terms of possible resolutions and is fully controllable with the controller. All cutscenes are now skippable and, oddly, some of the unlockable bonus modes and other elements are unlocked from the start. There are many checkpoint saves in addition to the save points, the real-time weapon switching returns (though in the middle of the fight it’s still much safer to do it via menu) and even a new difficulty mode has been added. While the game itself, in comparison to the original, has more weapon types and playstyles (in theory), while the ever-important “issen” parry/counter-attack is expanded a bit, while also becoming a bit harder to do accidentally. But then, things just fall apart. For one, the game is no longer designed as an exploration focused RE-like titles, so while it has keys and locked doors, apart from few optional backtracks, the entirety of the game is linear in terms of general progression. Made even sillier due to the fact that most locations are quite boring, while the rest are just one to one reused from the first game. The combat doesn’t feel meaningfully better or more interesting because while there are more weapons (and characters, on that later), it doesn’t change anything. All it means is that when you get the last normal weapon, you start using exclusively it on all enemy types that are hard to stagger or block a lot, because the weapon stunlocks them to death. And there isn’t a single reason to not do that boring, but extremely efficient thing. Especially since a lot of new enemy types are just plain boring otherwise. The other characters is meant to be the big thing of the game. The idea is simple – the game has a cast of four characters in addition to our main one and based on your relationship with them you get to see or not see additional story and gameplay scenes in the game. It even comes with a classic flowchart of events when you finish the game to see which elements you have seen and which you haven’t. The idea is neat and could make the otherwise linear game more interesting. But the execution is hilariously terrible. You see, the very start of the “proper” game happens in a small town with a little dungeon attached to it. This town is a safe area with different NPCs running around, a few of which may give you stuff if you talk to them a lot or give you a mini “quest”. And there is a shop in town that sells “gifts”. To buy gifts you need gold that you find in the dungeon, either lying on the floor or dropping from the enemies. And those “gifts” are the only meaningful mechanic of improving your relationship with other characters, with different gifts getting different reactions based on the character preferences. And that entire opening section can be done in about 20 minutes if you just do what needs to be done and move on. But doing so will mean that none of the characters (apart from one who’s tied to you via main story events) will get any additional scenes, because the shop, the gold, the quests only exist within that tiny section of the game. And while you can find some gifts occasionally afterwards, if the characters don’t like you enough they will not appear, so you can’t gift them. And that, in turn, means that the intended experience of the game is grinding around 2 hours or more in the opening section of the game, running back and forth in the few rooms to get enough gold, to buy gifts. To then know which gifts are best for which characters. And to then not accidentally trigger story events that will progress the story forward before you’ve done all the grinding you could in the current section. Which is insanely stupid. My resulting experience had one character (whom I gifted a lot of stuff) just not show up through the entirety of the rest of the game. One character show up a lot at first and then also disappear. And one character not appear at all, until their special gameplay section triggered and apparently I gifted them enough crap so they did appear and get a playable section, but afterwards also permanently disappeared never to be mentioned again. Given that the plot of the game is moronic in general, getting even less of it seems like a stupid design decision. In the end I just didn’t even know what was supposed to be the point of the game. The combat is a tiny bit more varied than the first game, but still way worse than Devil May Cry when comparing to the contemporaries and far worse by modern post-Ninja Gaiden Black standards. The exploration is basically gone. The plot is horrid. The character scenarios and town quests are a joke (if you’d swap gold for real money or daily quests you’d get a modern gacha design). The voice acting is still hilariously bad and mismatched with lip sync… It’s serviceable at best, but you should just play the first one instead. Or third one whenever that remaster hopefully comes out.

This game is literally a fever dream to me. I got it when I was ten at game stop and it was used. It came in one of those generic cover cases with the pictures of cartoon characters playing video games on it for five dollars, the disk was all scratched up but it worked. I had a high fever for a week and a half, and I sat in my parents bedroom playing this barely understanding reality and played all the way through, I barely remembered any of it immediately following beating it and wasn't really aware of what was going on the whole time I only knew the game was trippy as hell. I was tripping nuts and never touched it after that. So glad to play it again finally at the age of 27.