Onimusha 2’s Remaster Solidifies It as One of Capcom’s Best, & Weirdest, Games

About five hours of sword slashing into Onimusha 2, I thought to myself, “Boy, they don’t make them like this anymore.”

While Onimusha may not have the same name recognition as Capcom’s big hitters, it’s secretly been one of the publisher’s weirdest and most innovative franchises. But even in the larger series, Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny is a wonderfully bizarre little game. A sequel that was unafraid to change everything in the name of innovation, something you seldom see in modern gaming franchises. It’s a game brilliantly ahead of its time, brimming with personality and unforgivingly obtuse mechanics that demand experimentation.

While this remaster is fairly straightforward, Onimusha 2 perfectly embodies Capcom’s quirky spirit, and it’s nothing short of a masterpiece. But interestingly, going back to the game decades later reminds me of a more recent Capcom game, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. It made me realize there’s a clear through line between the two and how Onimusha 2 set the stage for some of Capcom’s more eccentric experiments.

Onimusha 2 takes place directly after the events of Onimusha: Warlords, but the games are fairly stand-alone. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, the core concept is basically a story that takes place in feudal Japan, where demons and supernatural entities exist. In Onimusha 2, you play as a samurai named Jubei Yagyu, seeking revenge against the demon hordes of the warlord Nobunaga Oda after they destroy his village.

Studying the Blade

A simple way to describe the first Onimusha is samurai Resident Evil, and while that style is still here a bit, Onimusha 2 is where the franchise really broke off to do its own thing. The game is broken up into a number of different chapters in which you progress through different interconnected areas, where you can oftentimes loop back to places you’ve been. Like early Resident Evil games, each area uses gorgeous pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles, but Onimusha 2 is more of a light action game than survival horror. There’s still a huge emphasis on exploration, though, and the entirety of Onimusha 2 often feels like one massive puzzle you have to put together.

To get the obvious out of the way first, this is a fairly straightforward remaster of Onimusha 2 that adds visual updates and quality-of-life elements. The only “new” feature is the absurd Hell Mode, where you can only take a single hit — something only for the staunchest of fans. But the visual upgrade is genuinely quite impressive. The pre-rendered backgrounds, in particular, look jaw-droppingly gorgeous, given extra crispness to pop off the screen. There’s a charming quirkiness to Onimusha 2 that came from a lot of those early PS2 games, with voice acting of questionable quality that ends up only adding personality. This remaster also unlocks all minigames from the start, and it has a gallery of art, music, and more to peruse.

Onimusha 2 still places an emphasis on inventory management, as things like healing items and ammo for ranged weapons are limited, and you don’t want to just use them willy-nilly. At the same time, Jubei gets access to four different Oni weapons that each have unique abilities and combos — as well as their own magic bar for a magic attack. That inserts another fascinating layer of resource management, as you need to pick and choose where to use magic attacks and how to budget each weapon’s gauge.

Onimusha 2’s combat still feels great, with a deliberate emphasis on timing and learning enemy combos. One of the defining features of combat is the Issen system, in which if you attack at the exact moment an enemy does, you use a devastating attack that eliminates them in a single hit, also yielding more orbs for you to absorb. Executing Issen requires some practice, but it feels phenomenally satisfying to pull off — and adds a huge benefit to getting better at the game’s combat.

A Tangled Web

But the secret sauce that really makes Onimusha 2 shine is its branching storyline, and you’ll have to experiment wildly to explore all of it. The game has four side characters who all play major roles in the story and have playable segments if your bond with them is high enough. You build that bond by giving each character gifts, which results in a sprawling trading system in which you get items in return and build affinity. It’s astounding how deep this trading system is and how much it affects the story itself, but Onimusha 2 tells you literally nothing about how it works. Instead, you need to experiment, see how characters react to gifts, and intuit what they like.

This also means that two playthroughs of Onimusha 2 might feel drastically different depending on the gifts you’ve given. In one playthrough, you might play as the gun-toting Magoichi Saika, saving Jubei after he’s petrified. In another, you might take on the role of the ninja Kotaro Fuma, solving puzzles in a forest of illusions. There are lengthy sections of the game that only appear if you’ve given gifts properly, and I genuinely love how obtuse the entire thing feels. It gives Onimusha 2 an almost unpredictable feel. Plus, the game only lasts roughly eight to 10 hours, so it’s easy to replay it multiple times and feel like you’re seeing something different.

But apart from the actual mechanics of it all, these four characters have some surprisingly touching stories. Each one gets their own arc that can change your interpretation of the overall story, from the warrior monk Ekei’s tragic family past that has given him lasting trauma, to the harrowing reason for Kotaro’s abrasive personality. There’s a richness to these characters that gets enhanced by the branching story, with each playthrough feeling like you’re getting to know them a bit more intimately. That’s something I don’t know if I’ve ever seen in another video game, the idea of replayability being used to actually enhance characters.

What I find most fascinating about Onimusha 2 is how its absolute lack of explaining anything actually becomes a strength. Modern video games are obsessed with tutorializing everything and making sure the player always knows exactly what they’re doing and why, but Onimusha 2 straight up doesn’t care. You have to piece your way forward through the story and discover how the game’s mechanics all fit together, and it’s a better game for it. Onimusha 2 unabashedly does its own thing, and the more you buy into that, the more entrancing the experience feels.

Onimusha 2 is the kind of game that the blockbuster side of the gaming industry feels like it’d be averse to these days, an ambitious sequel that completely leaves out everything the first game did, and keeps players in the dark. Even all these years later, I’m still blown away by the sheer gutsiness of the game, and in this case, I respect the choice to simply use this remaster as an update and not alter anything about the core vision of the game. If anything, I hope choosing to bring Onimusha 2 back in this way serves as inspiration for Capcom to re-embrace the series’ sense of experimentation as they revive it with Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

At the very least, experiencing Onimusha 2 again all these years later has solidified in my mind — it’s one of Capcom’s biggest unspoken masterpieces.

9/10

Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny launches May 23 for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Inverse reviewed the PS4 version.

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