It's time to make people with swords that know how to use them realisticly cool again.
User Rating: 8.5 | Onimusha: Warlords PS2
NOT SPOILER FREE.Imagine this. You are Samanouske Akechi, a mighty Samurai swordsman in red armor with no lord of loyalty. You are walking along a path, searching for Princess Yuki. There she is! You turn around to see a demon who yells at you "There he is!". You fend them away with your sword. A good deal of blood, but you couldn't seem to kill them. Now the ground trembles. A giant demon with a huge club appears. You strike him to no avail. He swats you aside as if you were a child. You pass out. Now you're dreaming. A voice appears in your head. Spirits appear around you. This is what they say. - We are the Oni. The clan of ogres that has been subverted by the demons. You are our only hope. A curious gauntlet with a red eye appears on your right arm. You wake up alone, except with this gauntlet still on your hand. Your resolve to rescue Princess Yuki and destroy the demons is hardened. Go! Now you start to play past the intro. Through the rest of the game, you will battle a variety of demons, get 4 more totally different weapons each unique in magic, looks, damage, and combo. The idea behind this game is basically a slightly toned down resident evil with a sword. The storyline is somewhat creepy, involving the sacrifice of a certain born girl after her peak amount of sadness to drink blood from her skull to summon Fortinbras, the most awesome demon snake you will ever see. The game has a decent amount of cliches, including rescueing the princess, saving your kuniochi from stuff, and killing the bad guy who wants to destroy the world for no reason by becoming almost omnipotent. The fighting is the mainpoint, so lets talk about that. You can attack and jam the attack button for that weapon's unique combo. You can also hit Back + Attack for an upward slash that lands your foe on the ground. Now you can get close and stab the floored enemy. When a foe comes close to attacking you, you can hit Attack at just the right time to use a Critical, causing you to get more souls upon the foe's death. You could use the easier method, blocking before getting hit and then pressing attack, but it does less damage and you don't get the extra soul points. There is a block button which will block most attacks, and a ready button that will allow you to sidestep and have an extra attack for your combo. Simple as the system is, the later enemies will require you to get very skilled with it. It isn't about the moveset here, it's about the timing. If you can critical, sidestep, block, and attack all at the right times, you will have no problem. However, be warned that the later enemies can become very difficult for the player who blindly attacks. This player will never even get 1/3 through the game by trying to simply hack through bosses and hordes of enemies. Jamming square doesn't cut it this time around. People who try this can use magic on the big enemies for a while, but it will catch up with them when they get half through the game. You can absorb the souls of the demons that die through your gauntlet. There are different kinds of souls. Yellow heal you, blue restore magic, and red give soul points. Soul points are basically exp. You use them to upgrade weapons, items, magic, and your gauntlet. Weapons get a new look, and do more damage. Magic gets more powerful and flashy, items become more effective for their one use, and the gauntlet gets more powerful whenever you spend souls. If you really pay attention to the surroundings, you'll find a lot of things that will come in handy, but they are in no way out in the open. Yes you will find treasure all over, but the scrolls are what you need. The more scrolls you acquire, the more you can translate Jibberish to English, allowing you to open chests that have special worded locks that require the right words. These chests are the ones worth finding. Other chests will either have items to further the story or basic and easy to get healing items or arrows. If you miss even one of these scrolls of translation, you might permeneantly miss your chance to unlock all of these throughout the game. With luck, you can still unlock them, but finding the scrolls is definitely the way to go from guessing. Anyway, such special chests usually have power or magic jewels. The enhance your health or magic meter. Very useful. You get to play as Kaede every now and then. She's the kuniochi I spoke of earlier. She can jump over enemies, throw shuriken, and attack somewhat more fiercely than Samanouske, but not as strong. Unlike many game and movie cliches, Kaede is very compitent. She can pick locks, fight, navigate, and so on. She is very smart, and collects information and completes tasks for Samanouske that he couldn't do himself. Besides the characters and combat, the walking around part of the game can sometimes stump you. You can walk around for a while and figure it out, until you accidentally stumble upon something you missed before. Now you facepalm yourself.
The camera is preset. It does not move with you, but rather sits in one spot while you move around from it's point of view. However, rarely will you findyourself irritated at not being able to see what's going on. You will almost never be irritated by enemies coming from another screen or not see an otherwise obvious area. It happens sometimes, but rarely.
The graphics are pretty good. Each enemy has their own detail. The game runs smoothly and completely lag free. The environments are great and varied. Never are they repeated. You go through one massive stronghold through the whole game, so you'll find yourself coming back to areas you couldn't access before now that you have the key to whatever you couldn't get past. You'll get a objective item you must use somewhere and think "Hey! I know what this is for!" just like you might in Legend of Zelda or Metroid. Asside from that, the graphical power it pumps out is pretty decent. It looks good, very smooth and fluid, blood gushes from each enemy as your sword smites them.
The sound is goodish. It music gets better toward the end, but most of the time it's pretty calm. The voices are pretty well done, and the clinking of metal to metal when you block sounds nice, as well as the ripping sound of your sword on flesh.
The story is pretty simple. A princess is kidnapped and is going to be used as a sacrifice to summon Fortinbras. A boy whom she basically adopted is going to be killed in front of her to max her sadness giving whoever drinks blood from her skull more power. You killed Nobunaga in the opening scene, but he has risen again by the demons as a demon himself. Not hesitating to betray his entire race, he quickly helps there cause. Tokichiro is another human samurai who has betrayed humans for demons. More crap along the way... blah mya sschmeh .... You finally make it to the end. Now you watch the most awesome story scene the PS2 has ever scene. You walk into a demon stronghold, conquer itm get to the bottom of it, and find the room where Yuki and Yumemaru ( the adopted kid) are being held. Now the great white snake demon god Fortinbras bolts into the room. He is huge and powerful looking. You think " Oh crap I'm screwed". Besides that, the graphical strength of this scene is second to none. The PS3 pumps out that kind of graphical authority. After you kill Fortinbras, the mother of all cliffhangers comes out to say hi. As you're all running out of the crumbling room, Fortinbras comes back to life and snatches up Samanouske with his mighty claw and squeezes him to the brink of death. He coughs up some blood which lands on the gauntlets eye. Now the Oni within is unleashed. You suddenly transform into a sweet warrior of the Oni clan, awesome in every respect. You really rip this evil god dude up now. You pass out while the others escape, you wake up normal again with Nobunaga, whom was killed by Samanouske in the beginning, walking toward him from steps. The end. Really makes you want to buy the next one right?
When it comes down to the cruks of it. You gotta save princess Yuki by hacking through demons and getting items to use on things in the stage to proceed, while solving some new problem every now and then along the way. A pretty sweet game. Not revolutionary, but sets solid what people already want. The only new aspect is the timing thing. As I said before, true skill comes from timing. In other games, timing is a factor, but not what decides the fight. Here, slamming Mountain Dew and coffee is the way to go to get those reflexes through the roof, especially on the later difficulties. The later ones can get somewhat difficult, but not impossible. Enjoy the game. 9 out of 10.
