Review: ‘Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny’ remaster an uneven trip down memory lane

To see how far gaming has come it s crucial to know where it has been Over years visual fidelity has improved so much that it s harder to tell video games from live-action movies The voice work has taken an enormous leap as the actors behind digital characters become stars in their own right and the gameplay has been refined to the point that older titles feel clunky at times The quality is so much better that playing the remaster of Onimusha Samurai s Destiny can be grating to those used to the likes of The Last of Us But the Capcom sequel must be put in context It was distributed at a time when having a protagonist that resembled a real-life actor was a novel idea and environments were static pre-rendered scenes rather than fully polygonal worlds After all the PlayStation hardware could only handle so much A BIGGER SCOPE FROM THE ORIGINAL Back in protagonist Jubei Yagyu s revenge tale against Oda Nobunaga the new leader of the demons was cutting edge graphically and cleverly used design to overcome the system s limitations It was also a more ambitious title that took the core concept of a samurai defeating an army of evil and expanded it out to include a village and a wider cast of characters It s a bigger tournament in scope from the original and thankfully developers leveraged modern consoles horsepower to upgrade the project around the edges It supports high-definition screens and improved graphical touches to the character models though the blocky sausage fingers remain All of this makes visuals passable by currently s standards The campaign isn t a treat for the eyes but it won t scar players eyeballs either Players will meet a larger cast of encouragement characters in Onimusha such as Magoichi left and Ekei right Capcom MAJOR UPGRADES The best changes come in the control scheme and gameplay Capcom modernizes the control scheme so that players don t have to deal with the infamous tank controls of this era For purists the developers keep it in and tie it to the directional pad but Onimusha works much better with the free movement of the left analog stick The club also modified the controls so that players spend less time in menus Players can hit R to bring up a map to help them address the world and they can switch weapons on the fly Unfortunately cycling through the arsenal still feels cumbersome especially when enemies swarm players It s often better to just pause the meeting and find the right weapon for the situation Although the controls were improved Onimusha is still a product of its generation Moving around the world means controlling the protagonist Jubei Yagyu across flat images and those pictures constantly shift as players move to different parts of rooms It s almost like playing a competition through defense cameras It s disorienting and players may not have a great angle on fighting foes who could be hiding behind corners or off camera The free movement mitigates particular of these issues allowing players to dodge attacks but again the switching camera angles still present confusion and control issues Oda Nobunaga and his demon army are the villains in Onimusha Capcom AHEAD OF ITS TIME Beyond that Onimusha has several forward-thinking ideas It expands on the core combat with four elemental weapons and one secret armament The swords spear and hammer all have their advantages in combat and players will have to switch among them to efficiently defeat enemies When demon s die they release orbs that Jubei can absorb and use to upgrade his arsenal and armor He even has an ability to transform into a more powerful ogre to deal heavy damage to adversaries Related Articles Hands-on with Kunitsu-Gami Path of the Goddess on Nintendo Switch Apple to debut dedicated gaming app within days of Switch s arrival Hands-on with Street Fighter on the Nintendo Switch Pikmin Bloom Mini Walk sprouts near Nintendo Store San Francisco Fortnite video encounter returns to iPhone app store in U S ending exile imposed by Apple More importantly Jubei runs across four promising allies on his adventures Players offer them gifts and depending on how they like Jubei the supporting cast will show up in different parts of the adventure to lend a hand That makes each play-through slightly different Although I appreciated the characters backstories the horrific English voice acting in Onimusha blunted any of the drama with particular scenes coming off as cringy The performances hinder but don t torpedo an adventure that is fun but also joyously weird Modern AAA titles have a focus-grouped sameness to them When one genre becomes effective other developers ape that aesthetic and that creates deja vu projects that feel like an experience gamers have played before Onimusha is far from that It s an unabashedly strange mix of historical fiction and the supernatural with the occasional robot thrown in That type of vigor is missing in a lot of current titles and Capcom s remaster is a reminder that this vibrancy still exists in the past Onimusha Samurai s Destiny Two stars out of four Platform PlayStation PC NIntendo Switch Xbox One Rating Mature