I played through the series for the first time earlier this year so this was nice timing
It's coming out in 2026, 20 years after the last game. Feeling bad for the people who've been waiting since 2006
Looks slower and more brutal than the old games. What are the odds this will be some sort of souls-like? Isn't that most action-adventure games these days?
I would love that. Warlords has always carried that darker, heavier feeling for me, and really makes it stand out against the others(though I do enjoy them, especially 3. Glorious use of Jean Reno).
It also feels like a majorly underutilized genre. We get Feudal action games, stealth games, but how often do you come across "Samurai Horror"?
3 was an incredibly goofy game and I love how clumsily it tried to bridge the gap between incredibly Japan-oriented sengoku samurai schlock and the Western audience Capcom, or more accurately, Keiji Inafune desperately tried to court. Not sure how they landed on Jean Reno of all people but I'm glad they did rather than whatever generic Hollywood action guy would've been popular and affordable at the time.
Inafune continued courting the Western audience even more explicitly when the Onimusha team pivoted to doing Shadow of Rome while another team did Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, which did a 180 and went full Japanese. Realism swapped for full-on anime character designs, JRPG elements, visual novel cutscenes, a standard shounen protag...
Dawn of Dreams actually ended up being my favourite overall game in the series. The mixture of RPG and hack n slash/light character action gameplay with a roster of fully playable party members you could swap to at any time was just really, really fun to me. My overriding impression playing each of the four games was that they were PS2 as fuck and it made sense the series began and ended with the console. Really happy to see it back though