The Final Word game review

Onimusha: Warlords -- Capcom

R.I.P.
So the first question out of my mouth is, "Onimusha?"... I wander what that means. A few minutes later I've got a translated title of "Devil Warrior Warlords"... Hm... that's not to good, I can see why they didn't bother translating it.

Next I fire up the game, and right after the first cinema where you get your gauntlet, I tell everyone in the room... "Oh, so I guess I'm going to collect souls to feed the Ogres so that they can escape from the prison and destroy the demons, and at the last moment my character will be consumed by the gauntlet and loose his life, becoming a slave of the Ogres, while saving the day.... HOW TRAGIC, sigh." I should really capture these moments on video. So I ask, is it me, or is this game already predictable before I'm even 10 minutes into it.

About 12 hours later, I discovered much to my disappointment that the game was horribly predictable. So much so that most of the time I could even tell you what was going to be in a chest before opening it.

On a positive note, I see that Capcom finally noticed that Keiji Inafune hasn't had an original idea since sometime back in 1988, although it was clearly a good idea. Also, someone seems to have noticed that the Resident Evil engine was getting pretty tired as well. So, in a brilliant moment of non-Capcom-like insight, someone apparently deduced that the best way to improve things was to jam together the Resident Evil engine with the Mega Man engine, while taking away the ability to jump... and we the mere mortal gamers receive a modicum of some very welcome improvements to the RE game. All of which, I'm sure, will be run into the ground like Capcom does with everything they do.

So, tell me this... was it really necessary to have a story where a lone guy and his under-powered female sidekick have to take on an invading horde of demons? Why couldn't this game have had all humans fighting? They could have even used a super-powered Shogun as the final boss, instead of a... sigh... snake (where's that damn bazooka when you need it).

Oh sure, I guess I've got some good things to say about this game. I'm glad you could save at-will at the save points. Um... I'm glad you could upgrade the "herb"s to "medicine"s so as to make them more effective. Umm.... OH, yeah. I liked how you could regain strength and magic buy picking up the energy from the enemies you killed (ie, the entire item/health meter structure from the Mega Man games). The cinemas were some of the best I've ever seen come out of Capcom. I mean, overall the game was really actually pretty good if you removed the 99% predictable gameplay/strategy, the rehashed story line (not that Capcom isn't know for rehashing story lines... cough), and the incredibly bad lip-sync of the voice actors with the animations. Lastly, Capcom, next time you do one of these games, pre-render all of the backgrounds on the console so that they mesh with the characters and items. I feel like I'm in an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon where you know that THAT "thing" is going to do something because the color doesn't match the background art!

So, you're saying 12 hours... that's not to bad for a game. Ehem... I know I could have finished the game far faster, but I opted to button press along all of the walls looking for items while I played. Hopefully finishing the game with everything (I ended up with all but three of the "FLOURITE" stones). Unfortunately, even with the panda suit you get for finishing the game with a grade "B" or higher, the game wasn't compelling enough for me to play it through a second time. Maybe I'll go back to an old save point and give it a go, but I don't know if I really care enough to bother.

Rent this game, solve it in three days, then maybe solve it again just before you take it back so you can laugh at Samanosuke running around in a giant panda costume... I wouln't spoil what the gauntlet looks like though... heh heh, I about fell over laughing.

(04/2001)