A new and better Onimusha! Capcom did it again!
Oni4 has four brand new characters and one “old” character. There are a total five playable characters in this game. Your main character, the black oni, is a new character and in the journey to defeat the evil force, you will meet with four other characters to join your party. When you go out for battle, you can bring one character as your partner or you can choose to play solo. You can switch playing as the main character or your partner anytime in the game. You can also switch your partner at any of the save point in the game.
Each character has different weapon, moveset, and oni power. There are around 30 weapons for each character to collect and different weapon gives you different attack power, combo, stat boost, oni magic, and special effect like elemental, attack wave, double experience or gold obtained. Your main character is using sword, others use blade, firearm, glove, and staff. Each weapon can level up to a maximum level 10 in order to fully unlock the potential of the weapon. Level up weapon and armor requires feeding them red soul which you absorbed from the defeated enemies.
Each character can level up to maximum level 100 and each level up gives you a skill point to attribute to your characters’ attack, defense and other skills. This is very straight forward because you can maximize all your characters’ skills at their maximum level. In other word, all characters need 99 skill points to fully max out their skills. All characters have different attack skills which are very cool in my opinion. Some parts of this game require you to master certain character’s skills in order to beat it.
In this game, you need to cooperate with different partners in order to solve a lot of puzzles and beat the game. Different character has different expertise like one can got through small holes, one can shoot long distance, one can move heavy block, and one can talk to the dead body. You need all their expertise to solve the puzzles in the game.
This game has a mini game called the “puzzle box”. You will meet a lot of these puzzle box in the game. Each puzzle box contains valuable item and you need to solve the color puzzle on it in order to open it. The color puzzles become more and more difficult to solve near the end of the game. However, if you cannot solve it, just break it and then bring the item to the shop to appraise, after that you will be able use the item.
In Oni4, you can also unlock 3 different sets of costume for all characters through the completion of 30 Test of Valor in the game and also by finding 10 Oni Charm in the game. You can redo the Test of Valor as many times as you wish in order to achieve the gold metal. The game also has a place called the “Dark Realm” which has 100 levels. You can only enter the Dark Realm with one character at a time and if you quit in the middle then next time you have to start from level 1 again. You can get two unique weapons (and one is the best weapon) for each character by completing level 50 & 100 with that character.
The control is fairly easy for Oni4. Basically you can slash, kick, do magic, perform special attack, absorb soul, block, roll, and transform using oni power. The only difficulty is that some of the attack skills are quite hard to perform because it requires you to move the left analog stick and 2 different buttons at the same time. But that will not cause any real problem to this game.
The graphic of this game is very nice, better quality than Oni3 in my opinion. Although the opening movie is not as good as Oni3 but overall this game provides more detail graphic and lot of movies in the game. Oni4 comes in 2 DVD and I think it is probably because it has lots of movie cut screen and the huge volume of sound vocal. I forgot to mention that you can select either to have everything in Japanese or English. Everything means subtitle, game menu, system menu, sound vocal and movie. Oni4 has a very nice ending song which is very sentimental.
The replay value of this game is great because you can save your game after beating the game and when you load the save file next time, you are at the beginning of the game and you carried forward almost everything from your previous game. It allows you to play through the game again to collect or complete whatever that you missed previously. By completing the game on Normal mode, you unlocked the Hard mode. However, you cannot carry forward anything to the Hard mode, which means you will start-up fresh in the Hard mode.
Overall, Oni4 is a great game and it offers longer hours of game-play than its previous games. It is a very beautiful and unique action game with lots of fun to play with. If you are a fan of the Onimusha series then you cannot miss this game. This game is a must buy to me and if you have not play any Onimusha before, then this game will be a perfect start to you.