Onimusha: Warlords
On imusha: Warlords is a fun relic, if you can stomach how old it feels.
Onimusha is a series that burned brief and bright for Capcom. It began in 2001 and was pretty much over by 2006, encompassing four main entries and two spin-offs. The original isn’t the series peak, but it’s a fun relic of the era of survival horror games that was popularized by Resident Evil. I would only play this re-release in 2019 if you’re an old fan, or curious about this generation of games that never had much of a presence of PC. Onimusha is an offbeat series, a mix between historical epic and fantasy that sadly didn’t survive the leap to the HD era like Resident Evil and Devil May Cry did. While the second game—with its innovative trading system, multiple playable characters, and branching storyline—is the series’ only masterpiece, the first game is still a fun curio from the Resident Evil lineage of fixed-camera action games. You play Samanosuke Akechi, a warrior who ventures to save Princess Yuki from Nobunaga and his army of demons. After being owned by the first big monster he encounters, he’s revived by a collective of ogres with a gauntlet that can absorb demon souls.
It won’t be much of a surprise to anyone to learn that this 2001 hack-and-slash game has dated in so many ways. Even next to Capcom’s Devil May Cry from the same year, which featured 3D backgrounds, a more active camera and faster combat, Onimusha feels retrograde. You mostly spend the game wandering through tightly-wound corridors full of demonic enemies and key-based puzzles. Calling it Resident Evil with swords, which is pretty much how the media described it at the time, isn’t far off—it even has healing herbs, and environments that are so complicated to navigate that it’s implausible humans ever existed there.
The combat is still nice and crunchy, though. Sword fights with enemies are paced like considered duels compared to DMC’s acrobatic flurries, and you really feel it when the blade connects with an opponent. Enemies spend more time circling you than windmilling, and a well-timed sword press will land an instant counter kill. The fixed camera angles do suck, though: If you’re fighting an enemy and they suddenly vanish off-screen, it’s pretty annoying. Likewise, being hit by an enemy you can’t even see is something modern games have pretty much eliminated.
The voice acting is still terrible, too—what could be a horror-tinged and creepy story is undermined by campy enemies and bad lip-syncing, both products of their time. This stuff might be annoying to acclimatize to if you never played these kinds of games about 20 years ago, but you’ll have to stomach it if you’re desperate to pick up Onimusha on PC.
The additional options in this PC version are super limited. You can remap the controls and change the resolution, but that’s it. The main issue with this version is some noticeable screen tearing, particularly during cutscenes. The framerate counter kept a steady 60fps throughout my playthrough, but to my eye it doesn’t really look any smoother than I remember it on PS2. The blurry low-res backgrounds really date the game, too.
Cult classic?
It’s also not a particularly long game at about five or six hours—the asking price of $20 isn’t unreasonable, but I would probably have preferred to have three or four of the original games in one package for a higher price, like the Devil May Cry collection. Nonetheless, for completists, it’s a start.
Much as I complain about Onimusha feeling old, I am absolutely the target audience for this re-release, and I had a lot of fun treating this playthrough like a speedrun, given that I finished the game five or six times on PS2. I’d struggle to recommend it to anyone below the age of 30 who grew up with prettier and more refined third-person action games, but if you were there at the time, Onimusha remains an important part of a golden era for Capcom during the early ’00s.
It doesn’t really look any smoother than I remember it on PS2