The game was really hard at first. I had the hardest difficulty fight
in Chapter 9 : White Tiger Camp Conclusion. Once I got over that hump,
the game just got way to simple and dumbed down. I just zoomed by the
game after that. I would say it's about 15 hours long if you skip over
the Phantom Realm. I spent atleast 5 hours in that getting recipes and
stones.
You don't visit towns, you don't talk to townspeople, you don't
visit shops, no random encounters, once you leave a stage you can never
re-enter it! The game was short with no reason to ever play it again. I
liked how they mixed fantasy, history, and sci-fi with the story and
feel. Overall I had fun with the battles, but the story, characters,
extreme linear aspects and just weak customablity makes this a generic
game.
----------Battle System----------
Onimusha Tactics is a turn-based strategy game very similar to
Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre series of games. The game has a
similar basic structure. Each character has a certain amount of spaces
they can move, some more than others. The good guys always go first,
and then the bad guys go again in the same round. You gain a level
after 100 experience points.
There's only a few weapons types in the game, there's a sword,
throwing knife or star, a gun, spear, or club. There's only three types
of armor with a vest, robe and a gi that the Ninja's only wear. There's
a ton of different assessories to equip including a guantlet, helmet,
wrist bands, etc. While there isn't many things to equip in this game,
they try to cure that with the "Spirit Points" Onimusha gets after
someone kills a monster. These points accumilate in levels and you can
eventually use these points to upgrade your weapons or armor. Sometimes
when you upgrade you can learn new attacks aswell. There's no shops in
the game, so the game makes you rely on Onimusha to make items for you.
Onimusha has a special band that can fuse stones and turn them into
items. You randomly get stones for killing monsters. You use these
stones to fuse items after you get the recipe for the weapon, item,
assessory or item.
Everyone has about a max of 4 special or magic attacks. These
attacks are range from blunt attacks, healing magic, magic attack,
spear thrusts, or throwing. There isn't a big variety in the special
attacks like Final Fantasy Tactics had. You gain new special attacks by
leveling your character up or upgrading your weapons.
A few things bugged me about the battle system though. The biggest
was you couldn't sneak up behind or beside an enemy and blindside them.
You couldn't get a more powerful attack if you're higher than your
enemy, sometimes you couldn't even attack them from above or below.
About 99% of the levels all have the same requirements or objectives
(Kill all monsters, keep Onimusha alive). If anyone other than Onimusha
dies on screen then they disappear and that's it. You'll never have to
worry about any of these characters disappearing forever like you would
in a game like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. They'll be back in
the next fight, the only "pentalty" is they round off your experience
points back to zero. This makes the game really easy, all you have to
do is send in a first wave of nobodies and just keep healing them with
your healer. The game rarely gets difficult.
----------Characters / Story----------
This is my first Onimusha game, so I pretty much felt lost. There
was a ton of crap I just didn't understand. The characters weren't very
impressive either. Once they joined you, for the most part half of them
become useless and never have dialog again. The characters names are so
Japanese it hurts.
The game had a formula set. The chapter begins with an intro, the
title of the chapter, dialog from the characters that matter within the
chapter, you fight your battle, then the ending dialog. This happens
every chapter. This got OLD and it felt contrived and rushed.
There's a few funny moments in the game like the guy that
consently is looking for naked chicks, or the two guys getting ambushed
while peeing on a bush. Other than that the dialog is very bland and
confusing.
----------Graphics / Sound----------
The characters looked great, the spells were interesting. The
world map is ugly and almost pointless. The stages looked randomly
created. There was barely any difference between them at all. When a
character would equip a new weapon it would show up on his hand during
battle. In the dialog scenes the characters move around with alot of
emotion and there might be some effects happening around them like
rain. There are some cutscenes in the game that mostly consist of a
still picture and small cgi sprites moves about. The music was
repetitive, but I liked most of the sound effects.
I really liked the style of the graphics, so they weren't
technically bad, but there isn't much content in the game and the whole
project felt rushed.
----------World Map----------
The World map is one screen with a bunch of dots across it. The
only problem is you can't re-trace your steps or go back to old levels,
once a level is finished its DONE. You get three options on the world
map, "Start", "Save / Load" and "Phantom Realm". Since this linear game
has no random encounters to level up, they have the Phantom Realm to
keep you occupied. The Phantom Realm is the only sidequest in the game,
it's basically the same stage but 16 of them with gradually harder
enemies each floor. Each time you defeat one of the four Genma Lords
you unlock a new set of stairs, so you can't climb the Phantom Realm
all the way until towards the end of the game. You can leave the
Phantom Realm at any time during battle though.
Since there's only three options in the game, one of them is not
an inventory or status screen. You can't set your characters skills,
weapons or anything until you start a level. This is the most ridulous
thing I've ever seen in a game.
----------Time to Complete Game (first run through, save after credits)----------
19:36
After you beat the game it warps you to the last stage so you can replay again or to play the Phantom Realm again.
