Discussing which franchise characters can beat each other up is a cherished gamer pastime. Smash Bros brought together old favorites and let people duke it out for glory to settle some of these old arguments. Building off of, or ripping directly from Smash Bros comes Capcom's Onimusha Blade Warriors. There's a small problem with Blade Warriors, though. While Smash Bros has a wide range of characters, environments, and music taken from and inspired by classic games we all grew up with, Blade Warriors has, well, Onimusha characters, Megaman, and that's just about it.
The fighting system in Blade Warriors is simple to understand, but difficult to master. Just smashing your way through the single-player mode takes little skill, but the combination of stances, counters, and disarms can make combat surprisingly deep and stylish if you take the time to master it. The problem is that there aren't many compelling reasons to take the time to master it. The unfortunately named Story Mode alternates between levels where you have to beat up a lot of mooks and levels where you have to beat up another character. Every once in a while you might get a cut-scene that has absolutely nothing to do with the character you are playing. Your reward for beating Story Mode? Watching the credits as it flashes pictures of the two main characters on the screen. That's right; you don't even get to see stills of the character you used to win the game.
The only real reason to play the game single-player at all is to unlock hidden characters for multiplayer. Versus Mode has a bit more promise. Just as with Smash Bros there are goodies that can be picked up and used in combat. Some of these are big effects, like flaming dragons or ice storms. There is also a laser gun. A laser gun made sense in Smash Bros where you have character from different games with different settings, some of which included laser guns. Onimusha Blade Warriors takes place entirely in demon-infested feudal Japan. It feels like it was thrown in just because Smash Bros had one. You can also upgrade your weapon and gain levels as you fight, but this also fails to fuel a need to continue playing.
Visually the game feels uninspired. Every stage has a couple of levels, which are unimaginatively worked in to the background as hills or houses. You jump from one to the next, batting down slow moving and rather dumb AI mooks, or faster moving yet still dumb story characters. The environments tend to be very green, which is understandable since a great deal of the levels are woodsy, but they fail to distinguish themselves from each other. "Oh look, it's another green smear with a house," you say as you play the 7th level, "Just like the other ones!" Occasionally you might get a cave, which is largely a blue and grey smear, and the best you can hope for is a ship or city where things are more interesting. Luckily, the characters are distinct, so there is at least something visually appealing to look at. Some of the big attack animations are even pretty impressive.
Onimusha Blade Warriors biggest fault is that it set out to be something that it simply cannot be. Everything that worked in the Smash Bros formula-- a huge cast of very different characters, big cartoony action with lots of goodies, and a lighthearted sense of fun-- is missing here. The only things Onimusha Blade Warriors has working for it are a decently complex combat system and some Megaman characters. It might be worth it purely as a party game if you didn't have to deal with the dull Story Mode to unlock so many characters. Onimusha Blade Warrior is a functional game, but fails to be a very entertaining or compelling game.
