Capcom Shows Onimusha

Capcom showed off its part-fiction, part-historical samurai game, Onimusha: Warlords, at its second annual gamers day in Las Vegas today. The game, finally approaching completion and nearing its January 25th ship date in Japan, has taken a team of around 70 people and the equivalent of 144 man-years to complete. From the sheer amount of polish this near-finished product has, it shows.

Clocking in at an average of 10,000 polygons per character, Onimusha: Warlords really manages to show off some of the power of the PlayStation 2 hardware. The motion capture process has captured everything from extremely realistic motion to minute facial expressions. The team even managed to pull off amazingly realistic-looking battle sequences by motion capturing six actors at once.

In what appears to be the first successful creation of a digital actor, Capcom has cast popular Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro in the lead role of Samanosuke, the samurai charged with rescuing a kidnapped princess. Kaneshiro, who also earns a credit as guest creator by supplying ideas throughout the game's development, not only provides the voice of Samanosuke, but also his likeness, which was copied through the use of plaster casts and intense motion capture sessions. As a result, Samanosuke not only looks like a real person - he looks like Takeshi Kaneshiro playing the role of a samurai. Casting a popular heartthrob-type of actor in the game was a calculated move to widen the game's appeal in the Japanese market.

The US version of the game, currently scheduled for a March release, will feature both the Japanese and English speech, with the option to enable English subtitles. While we weren't able to hear any of the English voice work for ourselves, Capcom has described it as movie-quality, with significantly less Resident Evil-style camp value. As the cost to produce the game is no doubt staggering, it's a pretty safe bet that we'll be seeing Onimusha sequels down the road, though Capcom wasn't ready to officially announce anything of that nature. We'll have more news and media of Onimusha: Warlords next week.