The Top Shelf: The Second Round 006: Onimusha 2

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

My journey through Capcom's Onimusha series, which began with the very first blog for this second round of eliminations back in January, has come a sudden and unfortunate stop with this game. It started so promisingly too. Onimusha 2 both is and is not a continuation of the previous game, Onimusha: Warlords: Samanosuke Akechi is no longer with us, instead replaced by a new but effectively identical red-tinged samurai protagonist named Jubei Yagyu, but the plot still picks up where the previous left off as the demon world's gambit to resurrect feared warlord Nobunaga Oda and have him fight for the sake of destructive evil continues to pay bloody dividends.

The chief difference between Onimusha and Onimusha 2 is a sense of scope: the sequel doesn't stick to just one compound like the last did, instead whizzing across Japan on a wild goose chase to find a bunch of McGuffin orbs passed down through the "Oni clan" - apparently a slightly less sinister sect of the demon world - while befriending a number of secondary hero types. The androgynous ninja Kotaro, the mysterious femme fatale Oyu, the boisterous bruiser Ekei, and the smooth gunslinger Magoichi take the place of the first game's Kaede as both helper characters and occasional substitute protagonists. Oddly, the game insists on having one of them be the "favored" companion of Jubei, and this works by giving them gifts that are either found in dungeons or bought from stores to increase their friendliness level. These gift items serve no other purpose than to get these companions to like you more, and each item is received differently by the four characters: for example, "adventurous" items like the compass and globe are preferred by Kotaro, while anything involving food, booze or women is best offered to Ekei. Presumably the designers ran into the issue of wanting more secondary characters to fill out the cast but realized that having them all help out or giving all of them their own separate chapters would be overkill, so they set up this fairly excessive means of letting the player choose their favorite.

Beyond the new sub-character system and the cross-country progression, the game's very similar to the first. You run through Resident Evil style environments with tank controls and a fixed camera perspective for each individual room and stretch of corridor while fighting demons and drawing in their ethereal soul remains, the color of which determines its use from leveling up equipment (red) to regaining health (yellow) and magic (blue). Jubei finds new magical weapons as he proceeds, each with their own elemental focus and separate progression tree. The combat in this game feels far more central and busy, with enemies spawning in waves in each new area rather than just having one or two enemies there waiting for you. The enemies are the same for the most part - slow moving zombie soldiers, larger foes that don't flinch against sword swings but telegraph their moves a lot, annoying small rolling guys who remind me of bonewheels - but combat's been tweaked to be faster and deadlier, letting Jubei cut through many enemies at once and finishing them off once they've been knocked down on the ground. I forget if the first game had "Issen" attacks - well-timed pre-emptive strikes just as the enemy is gearing up for a swing that almost always lead to an instant kill - but finding the right timing for those for each type of enemy has been fun, if a little trial-and-error. I'd also say the game looks fantastic for a PS2 game, even if most of what I saw of the game were the nondescript brown tunnels of a gold mine.

Alas, I ran afoul of something I should've anticipated when I started this feature: technical issues. There's a specific point after the gold mine level, where I open a tunnel to the demon world beneath, that the screen fades to black after an area transition and doesn't come back again. The music keeps playing, but nobody's home. It's happened twice now, at the same spot right after a nasty mini-boss fight, and I'm not sure there's much I can do to amend the situation. This particular PS2 console is almost old enough to drive, perhaps ironic given its continuing disc drive problems, and I'm concerned instances like this will be all too common moving forward.

For this reason, I'm making the possibly controversial decision to scrap this game's playthrough for this feature as well as those for the subsequent two games. My chief reason is that I want to play through all four games one after the other in their entirety, and I hold out hope that the current remaster-happy incarnation of Capcom decides to finally HD-ify this series and either drop them in a retail compilation and/or release them piecemeal digitally like Naughty Dog and their Jak & Daxter franchise are doing for their PS4 revisions. Should that happen, Onimusha will no longer be a PS2-dominant series in my eyes, and thus no longer eligible for the shelf. It's a sorry state of affairs that I hope won't be repeated too many times with The Top Shelf entries to come, as Onimusha was one of the few series on this second round list I was looking forward to seeing through to the end. As it is, playthroughs for Onimusha 2, Onimusha 3: Demon Siege and Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams will have to wait for another day. (I will say, however, that the successfully completed Onimusha: Warlords still has a shot at shelfhood.)

Result: (Ruefully) Eliminated.

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