Dying against a boss means not only do you have to rewatch an unskippable cutscene, but you also have to retrace your steps through the castle between the last save point and the boss fight. I found it really irritating, especially since boss fights don't have save points near them. There's no modern save system here, so you must find a magic mirror to mark your progress. It's incredibly frustrating when you lose to a boss, or otherwise die, and have to sit through the same cutscene again.ĭeath is another part of Onimusha where its aged mechanics are front and center. Instead, you are required to watch everything unfold. Speaking of which, one of the most glaring old-school quirks in Onimusha: Warlords are its unskippable cutscenes. I remember seeing them on my PS2 and being blown away by what was then high-quality CGI video. The pre-rendered cutscenes were a real treat in 2001, but in 2019, they look their age. There's a weird twitch to them, too, when they're supposed to be otherwise motionless. Their fingers don't move at all, stuck in a permanent, almost Ken-doll-like half open pose during cutscenes. I played through Onimusha on Nintendo Switch, and even on the small screen in handheld mode, the backgrounds looked tired and hopelessly dated.Ĭharacter animations are stiff, and faces have an unnatural plastic smoothness to them. One of the most glaring old-school quirks in Onimusha: Warlords are its unskippable cutscenes.The pre-rendered backgrounds, the hallmark of PS1 and PS2-era survival horror, look muddy and primitive when the light of high-definition shines upon them. If anything, freshening up the textures without bringing anything else into the modern era really brings out the creakiness of the PS2-era graphics. There are games running on your phone that look better. Those 2001 pre-rendered backgrounds and low-polygon count character models look absolutely primitive by today's standards.

Onimusha ps4 remaster