Two years of games had come out at the point and I was completely out of the magazine game by then. So I really had no idea what was out, what was good, what was not.
It took me several more paychecks to get the money together to get a memory card and a game. I'm not sure what the first games were I got. I remember getting Dark Cloud pretty early on. I would go to the many used games stores in the area on my days off and just dig through the shelves. I bought a lot of slop, but eventually I came across Onimusha Warlords. Capcom was sort of on a downswing at the time. Megaman didn't convert to 3d well. Resident Evil was exclusive to the Dreamcast. And I picked Mortal Kombat over Street Fighter for my fighting game.
So Onimusha was a gamble and honestly, I remember licking it, but putting it down and never returning to it.
Capcom remastered Onimusha Warlords in recent years. Once I confirmed it was Steamdeck compatible, I bought it on sale.
I have no idea how I didn't finish this game before. I took a look at a walkthrough table of contents and found that at 4 hours in, I was roughly 2/3rds done. I finished the game in 5 hours and honestly... what a relief. It was so nice to have a game that wasn't 40+ hours.
I love it! The moody symphony music is reminiscent of the early Resident Evil games. The settings are interesting and new. (There weren't and still aren't many games that take place in feudal Japan) The storyline is mostly interesting.
The textures looked great in game. Other than some PS2 game tropes, I'd think this was a modern game.
Now, saying that, there are some very PS2 stuff still going on.
The cutscenes are not remastered, so you get a compressed blurry mess for most of them.
The mouths don't match up to the words being spoken, assuming they built the game in Japanese and did a quick port job.
The movement is sort of squishy. The PS2 had a certain feel to it, like you were always moving about half a step after pressing forward. The combat is clunky, again, not really responding, just relying on banging the buttons a bunch.
The combat is very Resident Evil... except with swords and faster moving enemies. Which becomes a problem when you have prerendered backgrounds. Enemies can very easily do a roll attack from off screen and get you. There's these tentacle monsters that can put their tentacle in the ground and grab you and if you don't know where they are yet, it can be very annoying.
There is a bit of paper, rock, scissor to the game. Most of the weaker enemies, you can just go in swinging your sword and you'll win. Tougher enemies may require a lot of blocking, waiting for a good opening. Most the bosses require you to dodge their swing and hit them from behind.
The most PS2 thing about the game is that you can't skip cut scenes and there are often long cut scenes before boss battles that you will have to watch over and over again. I got a lot of scrolling done.
The game felt like a warm blanket. A time before incomprehensible menus built to try and sell you battle passes and skins. The game was the game and it spoke for itself. I'm sure there's dimensioning returns, but I cannot wait to play the sequel.
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