This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of The Ghosts of Onigawa fanmade campaign by Myriad for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
In The Ghosts of Onigawa, the investigators head to Japan to meet up with an old friend - only to get involved in a search for missing girls that bring them to haunted villages and castles and a wide variety of creatures from Japanese myths and folklore. The campaign is at its best with its quiet scenarios and bursting with ideas, but that often feels to its detriment - where it simply has too much going on at times.
The story of Ghosts of Onigawa starts quietly, with the investigators searching through a rural Japanese forest to try to find a grave. Soon, they find themselves in an alternate world, and on the quest to find a missing girl - and at the same time, discovering the violent past of the region, and the ghosts still bound to it due to the evil performed there. During the journey, there's a constant of stream of creatures from mythology - kappa, yuki-onna, tengu, and so on - but also video games. A Fatal Frame reference holds up most of the story, but there's also references to Dark Souls, Sekiro, and likely more I didn't recognize. This scope is widened by the end, which ends up trying to bring its big bad into a more worldwide mythological threat - which feels like it robs the campaign of some of its thematic strength. The campaign's constant references and mismatched tone also serve to rob it of strong connection - it's especially jarring to flip to an agenda that's entirely written in alliteration for no particular reason, only to draw a mythos card depicting a suicide right after it. When it's doing slow, ominous mystery, Onigawa shines, and outside of that, it stumbles.
Onigawa's campaign feels like it could be strongly divided into two parts - with scenarios 1, 2, 3, and 5 belonging to the first part, which is focused more on quiet, smaller horror and exploration, and 4, 6, 7, and 8 belonging to the second, which instead has a bigger, grander scope. The first half of the campaign involves going through spooky forests, villages, and the like - it all feels much more personal, on a smaller scale, with the biggest of monsters being especially frightening when they show up. The second half involves massive haunted battlefields, diety-like snakes, and more. The first scale works better for Arkham Horror in general - and the second scale ends up suffering from also cramming in more mechanics, and having things quickly devolve into slug-fest fighting against heavy foes. Scenario 5 in particular is a standout - runnign through a creepy mansion while persued by an unkillable enemy, it's easily the most fun and most memorable scenario of the campaign.
Mechanically, the campaign makes full use of most Arkham mechanics imaginable - the haunted keyword is here, bless and curse tokens are used through the campaign, one scenario has an exploration deck, and one scenario even uses frost tokens. It expands Hunter into a wider keyword to let monsters attack multiple times per turn, and also introduces keywords that trigger when an enemy engages you or is defeated. On their own, none of them mechanics end up being burdensome, although it rarely feels necessary to have specific keywords for them except to make a statement that they'll be recurring. This lack of mechanical identity also leaves the scenarios feeling seperate - those encounter cards that repeat tend to be lower impact, while a lack of focus on more distinct mechanics like bless and curse feel like a missed opportunity.
Its these wide variety of mechanics that Ghosts of Onigawa is always trying to play with, that means even its worst scenarios at least feel like they're trying to do something interesting. In Edge of the Earth frost tokens act as a campaign wide tracker - but isolating them to a single scenario, they can be a slowly ticking up clock, making your life worse and worse until you finally reach the end. While nothing particularly new is done with an exploration deck, it's randomized map-making serves as a contrast between the scenarios its next to - one of which forces your investigators to all move together due to being on a boat, and the other encouraging splitting up to find a required location. Sometimes though it just feels like the campaign is trying to do too much - one particular scenario stands out, where a second encounter deck flips over a global modifier every round that ends up bogging down play, especially as multiple elite enemies with end of turn or similiar effects are introduced, and ends up making the whole thing difficult to keep up with. The final scenario also suffers, with a win condition that doesn't feel particularly engaging or interesting, so much as just busywork and throwing actions away.
Ghosts of Onigawa also comes with its own player expansion, with six investigators and 93 player cards. The cards are generally of good quality - while the strength of some cards might be high in a few places, it doesn't feel overwhelmingly so, and even the weakest cards can likely find home in some decks. The investigators all have a place, and none are too overly complicated - with the simpler ones having their own niche in the line-up. I'd be unlikely to use the cards in wider campaigns, but for The Ghosts of Onigawa itself, they make a good addition to help spice up the experience.
Overall, The Ghosts of Onigawa is a solid campaign that's not without its rough edges due to widening its scope from quiet horror to a more epic, video-game feel. Its best in its first half, with the ending missing the mark, but never becoming outright bad. It's worth a try, especially with its player card expansion.
More on The Ghosts of Onigawa:
The Ghosts of Onigawa: Spoiler-Light Review
The Ghosts of Onigawa: Advice and Overview