Capcom announced a new Onimusha game last week and fans are probably not going to like it very much.
Onimusha was a series of games made by Capcom in the early 2000s that took Resident Evil gameplay and put it in a classic samurai setting. It was an interesting concept and it gained a lot of fans for its unique take on action-horror and Japanese aesthetics. The new game throws all that out the window in the form of a browser-based game.
The Japanese branch of Capcom announced last Friday that the new Onimusha game will go by the title “Onimusha Soul.” It will be a browser based game optimized for PCs and smartphones. While it would be cool if it stuck to the old style of Onimusha games, this one is going for more of a simulation route.
The new game will be a Sengoku simulation RPG featuring the characters that starred in the first three Onimusha titles on the PS2. This makes the game more like Romance of the Three Kingdoms which admittedly is more suited to browser gaming than the fast action of the console titles.
The gameplay will also follow the style of Romance of the Three Kingdoms with players becoming a feudal lord and fighting to rule all of Japan. It will be using the social elements of browser games in a unique way as players in each prefecture can join forces with other players in other prefectures to fight against a common threat.
The most interesting part of Onimusha Soul is that Capcom is using the Unity 3D engine to power the game. This should make it far more appealing than the visuals of other browser games that use Flash or other technologies. Of course, now that Flash supports Unreal Engine 3, it shouldn’t be long before browser games become more like console games.
This will be Capcom’s first browser based game, but it shows Capcom’s commitment to stay current with the ever changing games market. It will launch on June 28 with the smartphone version coming in Autumn. A Western release hasn’t been announced yet, but you can be sure that it will make its way over here.
Is this the right direction to go with the Onimusha series? Or should they stick to the classic gameplay? Let us know in the comments.