I was going to make this some long drawn out retrospective on the last 10 years in gaming, but I'm tired, and I've done plenty of writing for school already. I'll keep it short and sweet

I just tried to go back through and re-play the Onimusha series. I stated with the first one of course (The Genma Xbox version to be precise). Wow, that is nearly un-playable. The constantly shifting, UNCONTROLLABLE, camera is atrocious. This D-pad controls are bad enough, but add in that "up" is the direction he is facing, not up on the screen, oh my. These stupid issues make the game infuriatingly difficult too.

I'm sure if I gave it a fair amount of time I could get somewhat proficient with controls and be able to finish it again, but I don't want to. I played the first 2 games back when they came out and loved them. I recently re-bought the entire series, and was excited to play through it. I now realize that will probably never happen >_>

The moral if the story is, it really is crazy just how far we have come. Of course, to be fair, the design was archaic at it's time of release as well. I think this control and camera style would have been right at home on pre-dualshock PS1 and at least passable after the dualshock came out. It's too bad that a great series is so heavily marred by these stupid flaws. Dawn of Dreams isn't as clunky, so I'll probably at least be playing that one, but what a waste for these older ones. :/