Onimusha: Warlords (2001)

Que no ha envejecido de la mejor forma posible es innegable. Pero, aún así, he tenido la suerte de jugarlo por primera vez sin saber absolutamente nada y solo he podido tener la constante sensación de "Ojalá haberlo tenido en aquellas tardes de 2005". La ambientación, las mecánicas (a excepción de la cámara que me resulta horripilante), me han atrapado desde el primer instante. He echado horas practicando "issens" y he ido a por el Dark Realm en el primer run.

Es un juego al que le habría dedicado horas y horas en el momento adecuado. Es un gran juego.

I had never played an Onimusha game other than being mesmerized by Jean Reno's polygonal face as a child when a friend showed me Onimusha 3. This became one of my faves in a moment.

Played on switch, the port/remaster looks and works amazingly, but I wasn't prepared for it to truly, actually, be a Resident Evil game but samurais. Love the tank controls, fixed cameras and prerendered backgrounds, this game was made for mi Amigara Fault style. Of course it's clunky, of course some enemies will hit you from offscreen and of course some controls are bafflingly weird. But dang it looks and feels so good to me.

Getting the overpowered sword and beating the final boss into a pulp with it felt GOOD. Kaede deserved better. Onimusha franchise, here I come, I'm sure you didn't stop existing 3 generations ago for any real reason.......

PS: I'm looking at that tactics game on GBA that's on the Wii U virtual console with hearts in my eyes.

Not a 100% sure why i played it, but i did and it was more enjoyable than i thought it was going to be. You can absolute feel the energy of old Resident evil games off this as this was original going to be another RE again but even so it feels like it carves outs its own identity and manages to hold up even now*.

For a simple 6 hour romp, it was pretty enjoyable for almost the entirety of it (some forced grinding kind of got tedious) and if youre looking for an old school samurai game, you cant go too wrong with this one.

*I did play the remaster version that buffs up the textures and adds analogue control though

Beat on loan from my coworker. This was a very cool game like a cross between Resident Evil and Ninja Gaiden. I can't remember details of which weapons I preferred, the order of upgrades or tactics I used. I think I mostly used the lightning sword for its good balance. The game was fun and I do remember spending quite a bit of time grinding health as needed. But the game was also frustrating with the awkward camera angles and controls. The biggest problem I had was the direction that you dodge depends on the way the character is facing. I expect pressing dodge to the right to make the guy dodge to the right side of the screen. This fooled me up constantly and I never got the hang of it. It is just too complicated to keep track of what way the guy is facing, especially when the enemies block the view. So I struggled with combat more than I would have with more intuitive controls, but I did manage to beat everything including the Dark Realm. I was not able to survive the final boss's instant death move that required button mashing to survive; I hate the entire concept of mashing a button as quickly as possible. Maybe I could have done it with practice but it would have severely pissed me off. Instead I used the ultimate sword from beating the Dark Realm to beat the boss without him getting a chance to use that death move. Took a few attempts.

As much as I would like to give the game a 4/5, too much of it was deliberately designed to piss me off. 7.2/10.