Wow, Internet folks sure have a lot of opinions on Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine and Capcom’s Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Sorry, I am not here to talk crap about either, but both games reminded me there’s something I’ve been missing in every action game released after Feb. 2013.
I never see any comment gaining traction when it complains about the sad ratio of games featuring swords to games where swords actually behave as they should, and I don’t get why.
Let’s venture back into E3 2010 to get some necessary perspective. That’s when Platinum Games announced Metal Gear Solid: Rising via one of the most spectacular trailers of all time.
Even back then, Sony had already poisoned the well of fan trust by presenting fully pre-rendered cinematics as if they were actual gameplay, so anything that looked even barely above average had to be seen with great skepticism, and Metal Gear Solid: Rising was showing gameplay as we’d never seen before. Out of nowhere, Raiden was slicing up not just enemies but pretty much everything he wanted into as many pieces, and in whatever direction he wanted. It was absolutely wild, and, guess what? It was actual gameplay.
They ended up nerfing the dynamic cutting a bit for the final version of the game, the one you know as Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, in the sense that you could no longer immediately cut up any opponent that met your blade. Still, the entire tech remained. Bold, especially for a nearly 20-year-old game. Everyone loved the gameplay freedom it provided. I’d even go as far as to say that it ruined saber combat in every single game that followed, because it never showed up in any game since. Did Revengeance’s plot prove so incredibly wild that studio execs thought putting these mechanics in other games would infect them and immediately throw players off by reminding them of nonsensical plot points like that of a crazy rich guy with Presidential aspirations who wants to “Make America Great Again?” Like, is that the weirdest that MGS ever got?
And that wasn’t even the first time we saw similar mechanics getting shunned. The devs of 2002’s Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast designed it to feature dynamic saber dismemberments. The tech didn’t allow for the same level of realism as Revengeance, but it was pretty impressive for its time. Sadly, it’s locked away in the release version of the game to appease ratings boards, but PC users can unlock the option to have the most badass Star Wars experience of all time.
I get why the people behind a traditionally kid-friendly property like Star Wars wouldn’t want dismemberments, even when bloodless and a common occurrence in the movies. What I don’t get is the heavy emphasis we see nowadays on games where big guys wield even bigger swords that then don’t behave as real swords would. Onimusha is a game about a Samurai, the type of guy that, if my Manga serves me right, can always literally divide their problems into two. Still, in the new Onimusha, you’ll learn that only applies when performing pre-baked kill animations. Before the enemy’s health is nearly depleted, your sword works no better than a glorified stick. The same goes with the new Wolverine game, about a guy whose thing is having 6 big swords, and being in movies with box office results more or less proportional to the number of incomplete bodies lying in his wake.
We know the tech exists, and I’m willing to bet that there’s not one gamer out there who wouldn’t want to enjoy a more realistic (and fun) type of sword combat in a game. At a time when companies are going beyond all reason to achieve a level of graphical realism that nobody can stand, I wonder why they don’t just give us something readily available that everyone would love.
