Late last week we took a look at the scores of famous Capcom characters that have gotten samurai redesigns in the online social game Onimusha Soul. But sadly, while the cameo characters really are cool to look at, everything else in the game just feels run-of-the-mill for a collectible online card game.
When you first start up the game (after making an account, of course), you pick a region of Japan and its accompanying hero. Then you make a personal assistant character and are thrust into the game. To begin with, you are guided through several tutorial missions where you learn how to create a city base. You build farms for food, mines for metal and coal, and tree farms for wood. These resources can then be used to buy items or more and varied buildings for your city.
The other side of the game involves building a squad through the collection of character cards. You start with just your chosen starting hero, but soon, by doing base quests, you are able to put together a full squad of five. At this point you can begin playing the story mode.
In the story mode, you watch various characters skits, find treasure, get in fights, and win rewards—like buildings, resources, items, and cameo characters. Of course, like many similar social games, you can only do so many quests at a time before you need to start paying.
The battle system is almost non-existent and is based entirely on your battle preparation. You set up a team line-up before you start questing, and then your characters and the enemies take turns attacking each other until one or the other runs out of HP. You can strengthen your characters outside of battle by sacrificing other character cards to level them up.
There are also bosses that the whole community takes on and a PVP mode where your squad faces off against another player’s in a series of one-on-one matches where the best of five wins.
All in all, while not bad, Onimusha Soul just feels like any other number of similar card-collecting browser games. And while it was cool to see and collect the redesigned cameo characters, I doubt that single feature will be enough to keep me coming back. Still, if really like the Onimusha series or really want to collect the cameo characters (and you have a high level of Japanese proficiency), this might be the game for you.
To see how Onimusha Souls looks in action, including a battle between my squad and the cast of Final Fight, check out the video above.
Onimusha Souls is available on web browsers, iOS and Android systems and is free to play.
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To contact the author of this post, write to BiggestinJapan@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @BiggestinJapan.