Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny was provided by CAPCOM for review. Thank you!
Onimusha was definitely a franchise that slipped me by in the past. I hadn't actually heard of the series until the 2026 relaunch was announced recently, partly due to the fact that Onimusha was never originally released in Europe. To boil it down to simple terms, Onimusha is basically Resident Evil if it were set in feudal Japan. Onimusha 2 plays very similarly to other CAPCOM games of the era, like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, with a fixed camera angle and tank controls for the character.
The setting for Onimusha 2 is an interesting one, set in feudal Japan, but with a heavy emphasis on fantasy elements. Our protagonist, Jubei, of the Yagyu clan, sees his village burnt down before him by Oda Nobunaga himself, who has called on the aid of demons in order to conquer Japan. Thus begins our protagonist's quest for vengeance, whereupon he will meet others who are in similar tragic circumstances and want to defeat Nobunaga for their own reasons.
Jubei is a likable protagonist, and is portrayed as your fairly stereotypical honorable, yet vengeful type. The other allies you'll meet on your journey are also quite likable, although they often fit into the mold of 2-dimensional characters, figuratively speaking. There's also a "relationship" system in place that lets you give gifts to your allies, who will, in turn, give you an item back, which may prove useful, such as healing items and more. Having a high relationship stat with an ally also makes them show up to help sometimes in battles, which can make the game a bit easier.
Moving onto actual gameplay, if you've played an older Resident Evil or a Dino Crisis game, you'll know how they feel, a little stiff to control, and it can be a bit frustrating at times. Onimusha 2 isn't exactly a difficult game, but when you swing your sword and the game decides to ignore the enemy entirely, it can be a little frustrating.
The camera also doesn't help the situation; it's a fixed camera angle, so you would think that the developers could place it in the optimal position so the player has a clear view of the action. Sadly, in at least a few instances, that is not the case. Sometimes the camera is placed low down, and enemies can walk immediately in front of it, completely blocking your view of everything. It's very irritating. Capcom clearly decided to remain fully faithful to the original in regards to gameplay, but this is something that should have been changed as a basic quality of life improvement.
Despite these misgivings, the game is still a good amount of fun. Sure, it's janky, and it's a little irritating when the camera angle suddenly changes and you get disorientated, but it's a good bit of simple fun, and there's enough challenge in there to give you some satisfaction from defeating enemies without taking any damage.
You can switch up the combat with different weapons, the ability to use a "magic" attack, which essentially uses the element of your current weapon to deal massive damage, and you can enable "Onimusha mode", which basically makes you whack things harder. You also have the ability to block and some limited dodging capability, so there is some depth to the combat.
Having not played the original, it's hard to say how it compares, but most of the improvements have definitely been focused on the visual side of things. The backgrounds that you walk on are generally pretty detailed, and there are some nice visual effects for things like water and certain lighting.
Gameplay-wise, the main improvements are the fact that you can switch weapons in real-time, the "Onimusha Mode" is triggered manually by the player, whereas in the original it apparently activated by itself, which seems terrible, so this is a major improvement. The game also now auto-saves, which makes the game a lot easier, as you can only save at specific save points, but auto-saves ignore this limitation, meaning if you die, you can respawn much closer to where you died, compared to the original game.
There is also a "hell mode" difficulty, where you die after taking one hit from any enemy, but Oliver isn't really cut out for that!
Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny (Remastered) plays it safe as far as remasters go. It improves the game's appearance, as well as tackles a couple of obvious quality of life issues in the original, but besides that, it leaves the source material untouched. There are still a couple of issues (like the camera angles) that I would have liked to have seen addressed, but those who played the original PS2 release might appreciate how closely this sticks to it.
The game is a little on the shorter side, as you'd expect from a Capcom game of this era, but most players should get a good 7-8 hours from it if they aren't familiar with the game.
Onimusha 2 runs brilliantly on the Steam Deck. The game has great controller support, but it does run at 1280x720, so we do have some black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.
There are no graphical settings in the game, so the adjustments we can make are minimal. Thankfully, the game will run on a potato anyway.
The game actually uses relatively little power, but the cutscenes, which seem to be rendered in real-time, do take a little more juice to run. The game likes to stick to 60 FPS, and we can easily do so by applying an 8W TDP Limit.
Power draw is low, mostly holding around 8W-10W, and temperatures are also low, at around 55C. You can expect about 5.5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 4 hours on an LCD. If you're familiar with the game, you might be able to beat it in 1 battery charge on the OLED model!
The remaster of Onimusha 2 mostly improves the graphics and leaves the rest of the game largely untouched, so we don't have many accessibility options aside from subtitles. The game does have some difficulty options, and if you die several times on a higher difficulty, the game will ask if you wish to lower it.
Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny (Remastered) sticks faithfully to the original, while managing to improve in some key areas. Could it have done more? For sure. But that doesn't mean that it's a bad game by any means, it's a good bit of fun, even for someone like me without nostalgia, and I'm sure that if you do have nostalgia for this game, you'll have a good time with it.
Onimusha 2 also runs pretty flawlessly on the Steam Deck, with good controller support, great performance, and a long battery life.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny Remastered plays it a little safe, but improves the game in some key areas, and it runs great on Steam Deck.
