Cognition Dissemination: What Happened to the Onimusha Remasters?

It’s been a little over a year since Capcom released the Onimusha: Warlords remaster, as perfect an HD conversion of the PlayStation 2 game they could have made. The Japanese voice cast being changed outside Takeshi Kaneshiro, who lent his voice and likeness to protagonist Samanosuke Akechi, was fine enough. Impressions were bound to be split over its new soundtrack, which had to be changed thanks to the original game’s composer being a faker. The widescreen aspect ratio was achieved through zooming in on the 4:3 screen, due to working around the use of prerendered backgrounds. But it was a very playable remaster.

It seemed reasonable to conclude that remasters of the other titles would follow not too far behind. After all, the Resident Evil 0 HD Remaster released only a little over a year after the Resident Evil HD Remaster. But we haven’t seen any kind of announcement for future Onumusha remasters, or heard of anything related to the overall Onimusha franchise.

This is a real shame, because Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny needs this job more than the first game. Capcom added spiffy features to the first game’s remaster, the best among them being the option to switch from the old school Resident Evil-style tank controls to full analog controls. The first two Onimusha games were harder to control compared to the RE titles thanks to the former offering faster-paced action. It was frustrating to be surrounded by enemies in a game where two buttons had to be pressed to merely turn around, and that’s only one among several examples. This would work even better for the second game, which has five playable characters, three of which rely on quick actions.

The option for Japanese voices would also be splendid, regardless of whether they redubbed it. The original Onimusha: Warlords had a not-great dub, but it fortunately included the option for Japanese voiceovers, a feature retained for the remaster. But the second game had a terrible, ear-grating dub, with no option to choose from Japanese voiceovers thanks to Capcom apparently being unable to fit both languages on one PS2 DVD. It is in dire need of a remaster for the two reasons above, along with the desire to make all the games playable on current-generation consoles. But there has to be a reason why they haven’t announced it yet.

There’s a chance the company or organization that owns the rights to Japanese actor Yusaku Matsuda is being a pain to deal with. Matsuda was a popular actor in Japan at the height of his popularity, who lost the battle to bladder cancer at the young age of 40 in 1989. He was still popular enough in 2002 that Capcom worked to obtain the rights to use his likeness for Onimusha 2’s main character, Jubei Yagyu. Given how popular he was, it might cost a hefty price for them to reobtain those rights for a remaster, relative to what the remaster could sell.

While we’re on that topic: It’s certainly possible this hasn’t been announced because the Onimusha remaster bombed. It’s not unusual for remasters to miss bestseller charts, but Capcom hasn’t mentioned this since releasing it despite commenting on the sales of some previous remasters to investors. But there’s no way to know for sure here.

There’s still a better chance of this being a rights issue for Matsuda’s likeness, which may not improve going forward. If Capcom ever gets them back, they could run into the same issue with Onimusha 3: Demon Siege, which used the likeness of Jean Reno in addition to Kaneshiro for the returning Samanosuke. There’s a reason why the PC version was removed from Steam years ago.

If Capcom runs into rights problems with both games, they should consider jumping right to Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, the last game released in the series. It notably didn’t use the likenesses of any actors for its main characters, meaning there might be nothing hindering them from releasing it. DoD also doesn’t have any serious story connections to the older games, so it doesn’t require playing the previous games to understand the story. It could also use a remaster thanks to the changes Capcom made to the western release, the worst among them involved massively inflating the health of each boss, which made later fights a tedious chore.

Hopefully the first remaster isn’t the last we’ve heard of Onimusha. Capcom has a habit of using remaster collections to determine whether it will be worth continuing or reviving a franchise, even though this isn’t always a good idea. The consumer base tends to respond better to new games than remasters of old titles from the last-console generation or older. They most dubiously did this with Darkstalkers Resurrection, a remaster of the last two Darkstalkers arcade games from the 90s which sold well below expectations.

There’s no indication suggesting they’ve changed their standards, which means they could be repeating that pattern with Onimusha. But they should at least give a DoD remaster a shot, which could lead to a new game considering its producer (Yoshinori Ono) and other team members still work at or for Capcom. Perhaps we’ll get an answer about the future of the franchise soon, if there is one.