Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams

"It's pretty cool. But could've been better."

Ah... the Onimusha series, one of my personal favorites. The story is pretty much a hack from the trilogy that came before it. Instead of Nobunaga, now you get to fight Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Not to say that it isn't all that bad but anyways...

I'll start first with the characters. Now while I enjoy the designs of all the characters and whatnot, they feel like they don't belong in the same game. Even the main character Soki, seems like he doesn't belong in the Onimusha world. Most of these charcters seem like they'd be more at home in Genji: Dawn of the Samurai or Soul Calibur. Due to their over the top costume design. And their back stories are a nice throwback to the previous three games but it kinda sucks because it seems to be more of an after thought than anything significant. Plus the english voice acting blows, especially Akane's... ugh...

The graphics are very impressive. Probably some of the best I've seen on the PS2. Cool rain effects, blossoms blowing in the wind explosive magic attacks... they all look great. The only thing that kinda sucks is that there aren't any CGI cutscenes during the game. And another thing that annoyed me was that since they used the in game engine for the cutscenes they could've at least had it so that the weapons you equipped on your characters would be in the cutscene. A minor thing I know, but I guess I was a little spoiled by Vagrant Story.

Gameplay wise the it was a mixed bag for me. While I enjoyed the plethora of weapons and whatnot most of them were pretty useless and I ended up not using about 2/3 of them. And it was kinda annoying that most of the the weapons were just pallet swaps of old Onimusha weapons. While I think it's kinda cool that Soki can use Samanouske's and Jubei's old weapons, they added some lame names to them and made the attack power lame as well. The biggest offense was Samanouske's True Onimusha Sword, they renamed it Leviathan and made it lame. And it sucks to think that it was the same weapon Samanouske used to defeat Nobunaga. At first I tried leveling up all my weapons until I found out it takes 10 lvs. to max it out. So eventuallyl I just stuck to one weapon for most of the game until something better came along that I knew would have a higher max attack at lv. 10.

I enjoyed using all the different characters throughout the game but the partner AI was a pain. And I wished that they gave you the option to play solo as any of the other four characters. But each one played different enough that it was cool to able to use all of them. Their special attacks are pretty cool but most of them I found useless except for Tenkai's purification moves. But in terms of magic attacks I was sorely disapointed. All the elemental weapons produce the same magic attack for every character. Which tells me that they should've limited each character to have only one weapon for each elemental attribute. Which made me somewhat frustrated because the previous Onimusha games each had a unique characteristic to them and you had to use them in different ways and play to their strengths. In this installment it's just a pallet swap with the same magic attack.

Issen and Deflect Issens were also another issue for me. I think the only reason they included the cheap Issen in this game was because they knew that players would need it to beat all frickin' 100 levels of the Dark Realm. While it certainly looks cool when you use it, it's no longer a one hit kill. And it doesn't chop the enimies in half like in Onimusha 3, which left me wanting more. Since I mentioned it, yeah, the 100 Dark Realm floors really piss me off. If they were going to put that many in there they should've at least let you save every 25 floors or so. I don't remember how many cheap deaths I had playing through it. And to make the player go through 100 levels for every character? Give me a break. Playing through one set of 100 levels to get all the secret items would've been a little more justifiable. And breaking the game down into levels seems kinda dumb to me. I liked it better when the whole game was one big adventure.

Overall though aside from my nitpicks (since I'm a big fan) the game is still pretty solid. While it didn't give me the same kind of experience as Onimusha 3, I still enjoyed playing the game. It's definitely worth a rental, or a purchase when the price goes down(which is what I did). Overall I'd score the game a 7.5 but since I can't use fractions in my score I just rounded it up to an 8.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/13/06