Onimusha: Warlords

No Nostalgia Needed...

First, I think it’s worth mentioning that I wasn’t familiar with the Onimusha series until 2025, so this review comes from someone without any nostalgia for it.

What can I say... Despite the game’s age, it feels and plays ahead of its time. I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. The setting, the graphics, the characters, the soundtrack — everything’s great.

That said, I’d like to share a few words about the game’s difficulty. Surprisingly, it feels a bit too easy. For your first playthrough, the highest difficulty available is "normal." While the game can feel challenging at the beginning, the more you enhance your equipment, the easier it becomes.

One thing I didn’t enjoy was the controls. They felt a bit too slow for an action game like this, and occasionally, they caused me to take some unexpected and unwelcome hits (or maybe I’m just a slowpoke, lol ┐(￣ヮ￣)┌ ).

Still, for me, Onimusha: Warlords has become another favorite Capcom game, and I’ll definitely play it again — at least to unlock Ultimate Mode and complete it.

P.S.: My personal recommendation—play the game with Japanese voice-overs.

If you're skimming reviews, then at least get this one takeaway from mine: I STRONGLY recommend modding the game to have the original soundtrack. Please don't play the game with the remastered soundtrack. As a lover of the game, it was making me fall asleep.
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One of my favorite games out there, but I also fell in love with it as a five-year-old, so nostalgia easily plays a part in it. This is an old PS2 game that got a remastered port. I've played the game on normal, gotten all achievements, and finished the game on Hell Mode (a difficulty mode where you die in one hit from literally anything). And my hours with the game on Steam aren't counting the amount of time I've played it as a kid or on my own PS2 disc that I own. So I have a lot of experience with this game.
This is a survival action horror game. It is action survival at its core, but the horror elements are definitely there. I've heard this described as "Resident Evil but in Feudal Japan" and that's mostly accurate, I think.
It is a very difficult game when you first start. I grew up with only tank controls, so that's all I ever use. They did add in analog stick control, but the game uses the old-style fixed camera angles, which always mess up my ability to use analog sticks, personally. Though you can bait enemies into dropping healing orbs, healing items (herbs/medicine) are finite in the game, and only so many exist. So know that sometimes it's better to let yourself be low HP and bait out healing orbs than to use your precious healing items. Tip: Healing orbs are far more likely to show up if your HP is low (below half)!
I must say though, I could be biased, but the 'remastered' soundtrack is... just very bland and lacking any unique style. They created a new soundtrack for the game because of some controversies involving the original composer being a ghostwriter and someone else claiming it was their work (it's a whole thing you can look it up if you want to learn more). But I believe the original soundtrack is far superior to this remastered one. As someone who loves this game, I was falling asleep out of boredom to the remastered soundtrack, It was so bad to me that I preferred the game with its music turned off, which I feel really mean saying, but that's how it was. I eventually found a mod that restored the original soundtrack and it made the experience a lot better for me. You never expect how much the music of a game will affect you...
I STRONGLY recommend modding the game to have the original soundtrack. Please don't play the game with the remastered soundtrack, it'll make you fall asleep.

It's weird a game that is so short, was worth every penny. Played the ps2 version a few times, but still enjoy it 25 years later.

Got this because the new game was announced. Didn't know what to expect. Got hooked and beat it in one sitting. It's really good.

The Onimusha series were my absolute favorite games on the PS2. Onimusha 2 Samurai's Destiny was the first one I played. I very much enjoy the free range of motion with an analog stick as opposed to the old Resident Evil style of controlling your character. I hope they port the other games in the series and remaster them.

Pre-rendered backgrounds are great and never should've fallen out of fashion. For a port of a PS2 game, this does a decent job of preserving the quality of them. The game otherwise is decent though only about 4 hours long if you don't want to engage with the bonus game mode or challenge runs.

old mechanics. only worth nostalgia wise. MAKE ONIMUSHA 3 CAPCOM!!!