Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams is an action RPG-strategy puzzle game, which takes us into the world of 1596 Japan, where we battle the evil new empire of Hydeyoshi Toyotomi, taking on his minions of Genma while we try to stop him from moving his cherry trees across the country. Oniumsha offers us a wide arrange of new features, including a new Test of Valor mini game, the ability to play with more than one character on-screen at the same time, and new amazing quality cinematics. On the down side, the game world is very lacking in the way of graphics, and although you can play with more than one character on screen, the game only supports one player game play.

As for new game play features Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, they almost hit the nail on the head. The new Test of Valor mini-game takes us into a side mission (often prompted and easy to access) where we are given a time limit to kill a certain amount of monsters - most times in phases. At the end of all that we are awarded experience and an item, which are extremely hard to acquire any other way, as they aren't sold in stores, so you have to go out and either find them or have one of your characters make them between levels, which is also limited. The down side to the Test of Valor side missions is that you can do them over and over again, making me wonder if the developers expect you to do the missions over and over again to farm items and levels, which could become very repetitive extremely quickly.

Another new feature to the Onimusha series would be the ability to play with two characters on the screen at once, using the L2 button to switch between each character, giving us a new experience to the series, and adding some diversity and strategy to the game. Again though, the down side is that even though you can play as two characters the game is still limited to one player, even though they had a perfect opportunity to add a two player element to the game, and another setback seems to be that your companion's AI is extremely weak. The companion, the character you are not controlling at that very moment, will not use his special abilities at all, making it so if you want to use both characters' ability points effectively you must constantly switch between them, which can become annoying after awhile.

Another feature to the game which I enjoyed were the Puzzle Boxes. The Puzzle Boxes, which are found randomly around the world, have three rows of colored dots and a set amount of turns your allowed to rotate them. The goal is to match and line up all three colors to open the box.

The graphics in Onimusha did not strike me as anything amazing, with the character models' textures seeming pixilated and the world textures looking a bit grainy. Then you have the background animations ( the animations you see if you look out of the map area that play in the background like a sky texture) that are of much better quality, with a cinematic-like image of a city being destroyed, or a giant walking around a city - it seems like the developers focused more on these graphical features than on the model and world textures. Because of this I was extremely disappointed with the graphics in Onimusha Dawn of Sorrows.

One of my favorite aspects to Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams had to be the cinematics, and there were plenty of them. Leading us though the storyline, the cinematics seemed to pop up at least three times per level, and they actually captured my attention (which is not an easy task, especially for a cinematic) with great voice acting and graphics. These cinematics would just suck me in and keep me coming back for more. The way Onimusha used it's cinematics to display the story line was definitely the one thing I enjoyed the most about the game, and the only thing that really kept me going back to play the game.

Onimusha definitely has what it takes to be a fun game, but I think the developers dropped the ball in a couple of areas - especially with the absence of any kind of multiplayer, and the lack of graphical enhancements. Not that I'm saying the game isn't fun, it just had a lot of opportunity to be more than what it was. I think Onimusha would appeal to a player that enjoys games like Dynasty Warriors and those that like their action interspersed with solving puzzles and riddles. Give it a rental and see for yourself if this is your kind of game.