Genji: Dawn of the Samurai Review

Genji was a game I originally played because I heard it was a hidden gem and I recall it being pretty good. After playing so many games and going through the Onimusha series again in recent years. My appreciation for this particular game has grown considerably. For a game that was widely considered to be an "Onimusha clone". It surprisingly kicks Onimusha's ass in a number of departments.

The story while your typical action movie and by extension action game fare is decently presented with a number of high quality cutscenes with decent voice acting at least from what I can tell considering the North American version has no dub. While there is your usual tropes of damsels in distress, heroes working together to thwart an evil plot, heroes getting backstabbed and then a villain underlying backstabbing his master, the story does a good job making it clear who the back guys are and what the conflict is. There's just enough going on for me to pay attention to the cutscenes when there isn't gameplay happening. The story is better presented than Onimusha Warlords and 2 at least.

The gameplay while sharing striking similarities to Onimusha differ considerably. For one there is no fixed camera angles but a follow camera. I wanted the Onimusha series to have a system like this and it took a different developer and game for this to be implemented. It's more similar to the camera system found in God of War which funnily enough came out the same year as this game.

Then there is also the fact that the Yoshitsune is a lot more acrobatic, agile and more nimble than an Onimusha protagonist. He can block and strafe around his enemies but he can carthwheel and flip around his enemies too. As a result reliably evading enemy attacks is more doable than the strafing system in Onimusha. The only downside to this is you might need to let go of R1 for Yoshitsune to lock on back to an enemy again from time to time.

Put them the agile movement and the follow cam together and it's easier to feel competent at Genji than by comparison to something like Onimusha 2 since the hit boxes for Yoshitsune to get hit by an enemy aren't too wide and flipping around gives some decent invinciblity frames.

It doesn't just end there, this now leads to the Kamui mechanic. It really feels ingenious. It's esstentially removing Onimusha's elemental magic system and instead have magic attacks be tied to the Issen counter attacks. It's like how in samurai moves where the protagonist kills multiple enemies in one strike. Kamui esstentially slows down time like say bullet time in Max Payne and there is a timing window where you can make a devastating counter attack that can do a lot of damage, wipe out enemies one at a time or killing a group in one slash. You can even reflect projectiles back with good timing too.

This does sound like a "win" button on paper but even the square button prompt that shows up can be misleading, more often than not you have to press sqaure a few seconds before the prompt even shows so there is some attack learning that has to be done. If timed well, bosses can die pretty quickly or can have their health bar levelled. I did wish there more wiggle room for this since you scarifice two kamui bars to slow down time even more but it doesn't make much of a difference. It would be interesting if two bars guarentees the counter but does less damage but one bar the window is tighter but a successful parry can do a lot of damage. Still, this system is solid as is.

It does handle a shop and economy system better than Onimusha 2 since it's prevelant throughout the entire game of Genji. The combat animations, sound effect when the blade hits an enemy and the blood splatter makes combat look and feel satisfying too.

Moment to moment level exploration is straightforward and never too confusing, there is so nice sections of the level looping back on itself.

There are some issues I have with all this said. As much as I love playing as Yoshitsune, the other playable character Benkei is cumbersome and not very enjoyable. His base movement is much slower and he can't dodge around as nimbly as Yoshitsune. Using kamui almost becomes a borderline neccessity to get anywhere with him.

Environments get reused a lot. Chapter 3 has much of the same scenery in Chapter 1 with only one new area to visit after. Chapter 2 doesn't even have a world map either and that with new environments.

Final issue is that the final boss Kagekiyo's final form can feel like a massive difficulty spike. It was so hard that I forgot you can upgrade your stats by using amahagne shards since you never really needed to interact with it beforehand as long as you bought high level gear and sword.

His attacks can hit hard and kamui isn't very useful since he can teleport and dart around all over the map. Before you had to pay attention to the animation but he disppears and repears before you retaliate.

Overall, despite some blemishes Genji is a well made game.