Onimusha 2 – Samurai's Destiny Remastered review: Sharpness of sword saga softened by superannuated systems
Games are not like movies in that old favourites often can't be played on newer consoles due to the inexorable march of technology. Yet a remaster is no little undertaking and so publishers must have a strategy as to which to give the makeover.
Is it based on enduring popularity or the need for a marketing assist? Capcom's Japanese hack'n'slash franchise Onimusha shone briefly in the early 2000s with four entries in the series selling well. Each instalment followed a samurai and his allies pursuing the supernaturally evil warlord Nobunaga and his hordes of demons.
But diminishing returns left Onimusha dormant until a remaster in 2019 was politely if unenthusiastically received.
So why then six years later do we have this redux of the second in the series, albeit the best-selling episode? It probably hopes to stir interest in the big-budget series revival Onimusha: Way of the Sword – due in 2026.
For now, Samurai's Destiny Remastered gives us a glimpse into the past of a different mindset in game design – one that makes the player suffer unnecessarily. Digging out my own review of the 2002 version from more than two decades ago, my biggest complaint was about the awkward tank-style controls that overcomplicated combat.
Capcom wisely fixed that issue for the remaster by adding more sensible left-stick controls. But it presumably would have been much harder to address the non-scrolling level design where your character flicks from screen to screen as he reaches the edge. The concept was inherited from Capcom's Resident Evil but made more sense there in a slow-moving survival horror.
Here in fast-moving Onimusha 2, it's a design flaw that becomes a frequent frustration when enemies attack from off-screen. Worse still, your samurai regularly bamboozles your sense of his direction with a sudden, sometimes involuntary shift in camera angle as the level unfolds. It affords your foes too many cheap hits and confounds your internal compass.
All of this undermines what remains an enjoyably batty adventure blessed by an intricate combat system intersecting with some fabulous monster designs. The high-def glow-up papers over the game's PS2 origins and Capcom supplies a decent amount of bonus content in the form of artwork galleries and the like.
If nothing else, it whets the appetite for next year's big Onimusha revival, so perhaps that's job done after all.
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