Onimusha: Blade Warriors review (PS2)

If Onimusha 3 is this summer’s big screen blockbuster, Onimusha: Blade Warriors is the animated TV spin-off. Not that videogame spin-offs are a bad thing. What could be wrong with Mario driving a go-kart? Or a strategy version of Final Fantasy? But a multiplayer fighting game based on a game that already centres on fighting? Perhaps a little more innovation is needed.

In comparison to its parent game, Blade Warriors seems like very much a stripped-down experience. Characters that intrigued through their quirks and interactions have become a series of ciphers, right down to their near-identical special moves.

All ninja look grey in the dark

Demon ninja and undead samurai may be fascinating in their own context, but with the amount of similar characters on offer in Blade Warriors, it becomes hard to pick any one over another. The main Onimusha games were all built around a sense of narrative, even if their plots could seem thin. But there is no sense of grandeur and drama when random characters get thrown into battles for almost no reason. Goals like “kill all enemies in 3 minutes!” hardly seem heroic compared to the usual world saving.

There is a vague semblance of plot, but it is so poorly presented in a few almost irrelevant cut scenes, that it hardly registers. Especially after repeated plays, when the “loading” screen will probably be the thing you remember most.

But of course, it’s a fighting, game, so the plot shouldn’t matter at all, should it? Soul Blade, Tekken and Street Fighter didn’t exactly have complex plots, did they? Maybe, but at least they had characters that stood well on their own, as opposed to being mostly taken from different games (although that can work at times). And for those of us who’ve played Onimusha and its sequels, it can only make less sense as we wonder why Jubei would be firing a laser rifle at Kaede. If you’re a fan of the series or the characters, you’ll probably be more disappointed than anyone else.

It’s-a me, Nobunaga!

So it’s all good fun and games then, without any meaningful atmospherics. The gameplay could still make for a lack of atmosphere. The original Dead or Alive wasn’t exactly brimming with charming characters either. Unfortunately, the derivative gameplay of Blade Warriors does little to redeem itself. In fact, just like the characters it features, it comes off worse in comparison to its source.

Now I don’t know whether anyone at Capcom is pretending otherwise, but Blade Warriors plays very similarly to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series of games. Right down to the giant mallets and lightsabers. Smash Bros. was a fast and easy-to-pick-up multiplayer fighting game, with loads of characters and random power-ups. Although Blade Warriors is built on a similar template, it varies in a few key ways that make it less successful. For a start it isn’t as easy to pick up and play. The characters start off quite weak and need to be powered up through extended play. The controls are responsive enough, but not immediately intuitive in their response times. There are multi-level combat arenas, but there aren’t enough features in most of these arenas to make them tactically interesting and the paths between height levels in the arenas is often less than obvious, where a double-tap might often take you somewhere seemingly random.

Four-player multiplayer is the raison d’etre of Blade Warriors, but as mentioned before, the similarity of the characters dulls the sense of competition. The confusing-but-still-dull levels also serve to hamper smooth gameplay. At its heart Blade Warriors is lacking the two things essential to any good multiplayer game: depth and variety.

Dash attack

But it would be unfair to criticize Blade Warriors for not being Smash Bros., especially since there is nothing else like it on its platform. If it hadn’t tried so hard to be simple, it might have succeeded in being a bit more entertaining. What we’re left with is still enjoyable, with a more than workable combat system. It just seems like an obvious half-measure. Although persisting for a while with the game does take you somewhere, with more characters to unlock (most notably Mega Man) and newer outfits and weapons for your efforts, it’s a solid reward system for a basic game. But that’s all there is. Blade Warriors could have been a simple guilty pleasure, if it didn’t insist on constantly reminding us that there are better games to be played.