Games like Onimusha don't get made anymore.
The underrated 2001 Capcom classic is somewhere between an arcade brawler and Resident Evil. Creeping slowly through rooms with fixed, often askew camera angles, sword drawn, the samurai protagonist hacks his way through hordes of undead demons, solving small puzzles and soaking in the ambience. It's slow, stiff, and tense. Now, remastered for modern consoles and PC as Onimusha: Warlords, it shows all the marks of age. The movement is awkward, as is the combat. The voice acting gives the game the mood of a badly dubbed import action movie. Enemies hit hard—honestly, probably a bit too hard.
And yet I adore Onimusha: Warlords, and it has me reflecting on the direction action games have taken in the decade and a half since the its initial release.
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The lineage of Onimusha is an odd one: its work is clearly influential for later games like Devil May Cry, which pushed the genre in more acrobatic, superhuman directions. Instead of standing and slashing with a sword, DMC's hero jumps, flips, and spins, juggling sword and guns in combat that quickly becomes as much dance as it does action setpiece. As time went on, that tendency grew more and more pronounced, and action heroes in games grew more and more powerful. Consider Bayonetta, significant chunks of which take place on falling debris in mid-air—a game that infuses its lead character with such a sheen of warrior cool that her weapons literally materialize out of her own body.
Onimusha, as an action game created by Capcom in the years prior to Devil May Cry, stands as a foundation for what would later be called the "character action game." And yet it is so early in the subgenre's history as to be nearly unrecognizable next to its descendants. Onimusha's power is in its striking deliberateness—the frantic straightforwardness of combat, the satisfaction of slow, simple puzzles. Its hero, Samonosuke, is not a superhero. He has limited supernatural powers, but most of the game's verbs are incredibly basic. You walk, you investigate, you slash your sword, you block with your sword, and you run away. As a protagonist, he has a wonderful averageness to him. He's a good fighter, sure, but he's entirely unqualified to be dealing with the demonic nonsense before him. He's just squaring his feet, lifting his weapon, and going to fight.
It's that sense of averageness that I admire in Onimusha, and that the games later in its bloodline miss out on. Onimusha is an almost desperate game, mildly frightening, owing much more to its Resident Evil roots than even the first Devil May Cry (which, like Onimusha, started its life as a Resident Evil spinoff concept before growing into its own creature.) It's not a bombastic title; it's a fight for survival. And that's satisfying, in a white-knuckle-grip kind of way.
Modern action games do have a strain of this desperation, this sense of averageness, mostly stemming from titles like Dark Souls, games that turn extreme difficulty and elliptical storytelling into a calling card. But Onimusha is something different: It's plain. Its hero, its setting, its circumstances all spiral wildly into the impossible. Samonosuke is just a warrior trying to save a princess, locked against his wishes into an unending battle with demonic powers.
It's a type of feeling that has largely been stamped out of gaming, as have the modest titles that carried it. The heyday of Onimusha was also the heyday of the double-A game, where major companies could invest in modest games without major refinement or entirely coherent mechanics. Double-A games tried things. And as that budgetary middle ground died out, so did that experimentation; games turned more and more toward extraordinary characters in impossible situations, intensely powerful heroes fighting gods to reshape entire worlds. 2018's God of War had some of Onimusha's sense of limited scale, but cast its quiet stakes against a mythological backdrop. Samonosuke's journey occurs in a large, fictionalized historical setting, but it feels small, and he never feels like a larger-than-life hero.
Onimusha: Warlords, then, is a welcome reminder, at the beginning of this year, that heroic stories don't always have to be larger than life. They can be small, and creepy, and odd. Just a dude with a sword, determined not to get murdered by a bunch of demons. Sometimes, those stories are better, anyway.