Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny makes me think that demons need to be inserted into more of the world’s history. Can you imagine if William the Conqueror wasn’t just a Franco-Norman with a nark on, but a ten-foot demon prince? Instead of cavalry and clever tactics at the Battle of Hastings, he could send out the half-man half-horse demon soldiers. And what about Genghis Khan? Man was practically half-demon anyway. This way, a large part of the human race would have a little demon in them.
Anyway, the reason for this weird tangent is that I quite liked the broad strokes of Onimusha 2’s plot. I never played the original, but now that it’s been given shiny new graphics, I thought I’d fill this gap in my gaming knowledge. The result is something of a mixed bag. The central plot is nice, but it’s shackled to a dull as dishwater protagonist. The combat is skilful and exciting, but dragged down by poor gameplay choices that’ve been lifted wholesale from 2002.
Focus Sharpens The Mind
Onimusha 2’s demonic figure in question is Oda Nobunaga. In this case he wasn’t just a feudal lord who worked to unite Japan, but the embodiment of one of his nicknames – a demon king. Together with his demon friends, Nobunaga steamrolls Yagyu village in a startlingly brutal opening cutscene. Unfortunately, this village was the home of Jubei Yagyu, noted Samurai, who embarks on a quest to collect five sacred orbs and give Nobunaga a jolly good seeing to.
It’s an interesting plot, made more so by the fact that it’s somewhat branching. Jubei meets other characters on his journey, which he can interact with and befriend. Depending on how well you get on, they’ll appear at key points in the story and even become playable. It’s a neat touch. It’s just a shame that these characters have to be shackled to Jubei, who is an ultimate personality vacuum. He barely says anything and when he does, it’s usually the occasional grunted question. At one point a side character, Oyu, falls in love with him, despite him doing nothing but grumpily frown at her. A shame really, as the side characters are decently well written otherwise.
I’m going to get to the combat in a moment, but a word on the remastering. It makes a big point of its HD graphics and, to be honest, they aren’t too bad. The cutscenes suffer a little from the ‘potato face’ effect of the early 2000s, but everything looks bright and colourful. Enemy designs remain great, even if there is some blatant reskinning going on. Boss designs are decent too, though it gets limited points for that as it uses the same two bosses three times each. Controller support is excellent, and it seems like a very well optimised remastering. I strongly recommend switching off English vocals, though. They didn’t remaster those, so it still sounds like an amateur dramatics group at a first script reading.
Rise And Move On
So, that combat. I was intrigued by a quote from one of the Onimusha 2 devs that the combat was designed to punish button mashing. It really does. My first instinct was to swing wildly at the first enemy I saw, which promptly turned Jubei into sliced samurai. The swordplay rewards patience. Your swings do a hefty amount of damage, but the key is to connect them before the enemy does. So blocking and dodging are key, as is picking your moment to strike. Once you’ve got that down, you can start working on an ‘Issen’, where you attack just before the enemy does.
This yields a critical hit, which kills most standard enemies in one hit. In something of a masterstroke, performing one nets you a lot of ‘soul orbs’. These come in different flavours, but one is ‘health’. Health items are limited, so the best way to heal is to learn your way around the combat, and rip your HP right out of your enemies. It also yields you XP for upgrading armour and the various weapons (sword, spear, hammer and odd, double-bladed thingy). Though there’s only three levels for each, and other weapon upgrades just increase how much you can charge. So the RPG aspect drops off quick.
That said, I found myself getting into the combat. Which is a shame, because there’s one thing that absolutely tears it to shreds: the camera. Onimusha 2 uses the classic Capcom fixed camera. This is fine in something like Resident Evil, where it adds a sense of being watched and the struggle adds to the horror, but in an action game? All it does is mess with my perception, making Issen harder than it needs to be. Hell, it makes walking through a door a complicated task. When fighting bosses? You have no idea what they’re doing half the time. It’s needlessly frustrating, and caused all the goodwill towards the combat to dribble away.
Onimusha 2 – Faithfully Frustrating
As I said before, I’m a newcomer to this series. I’ve not played the original, so I’m coming in completely blind. Onimusha 2 got close to selling me with its challenging, skilful combat but it ended up losing me. The frustrating camera was a big reason. Jubei’s stony personality being another one. A shame, because I grew to quite like the other characters, especially the rifle-wielding Magoichi. Well, once I’d switched to the Japanese vocals at any rate.
I suspect this sort of thing is always going to be an issue when playing a remastering of a beloved game. If you’re a fan of the original, then I’ve no doubt you’ll love it. It’s everything it was, with some nicely touched up graphics and a smooth framerate. Certainly, when I went crying to various forums for advice on the combat, everyone expressed a fondness. I can’t see this remastering of Onimusha 2 winning over too many strangers to the franchise, but for old hats, it might encourage some dusting off of the issen muscles.
