Onimusha is a weird series. In a span of five years from 2001 to 2006, we got four mainline Onimusha games, a fighting game, and a tactical RPG spin-off. After that… nothing. Outside of a Japan-exclusive mobile game in 2012 and a remaster of the first two entries, there hasn’t been a new Onimusha in nearly 20 years. This is one of Capcom’s ten biggest franchises, but unless you had a PS2 and an interest in historical fantasy action games in the early 00s, you’ve probably never heard of it.
That puts the upcoming Onimusha: Way of the Sword in a somewhat precarious position. What does a modern Onimusha look like when it hasn’t had a chance to evolve with the times? How much reverence should you give to a property that hardly anyone remembers at this point? Can Capcom revitalize the series the same way it did withResident EvilandDragon’s Dogma, or should we brace for an avalanche of ‘we have Nioh at home’ memes come February?
The OG Soul Farmer
More than a decade before Dark Souls turned soul harvesting into an entire RPG sub-genre, Onimusha was already farming demons (or Genma) and exchanging their tortured souls for cash and prizes. The fixed-camera action series, once envisioned as a ninja version of Resident Evil, is following in the footsteps of 2006’s Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, which used a more modern third-person camera, but retains the core soul-collecting mechanic that defined it.
Way of the Sword lead Musashi - likely a younger version of the 2023 anime protagonist of the same name - wields a magical device called the Oni gauntlet that allows him to see, defeat, and absorb the souls of the Genma. There are three different types of souls: blue souls provide power to use special abilities, yellow souls regenerate health, and red souls provide experience points. Different abilities and attacks will cause different types of souls to spill out of enemies. For example, once Musashi deflects enough attacks, he will enter a powered-up state, where attacks cause demons to spill more blue souls, allowing Musashi to use his strongest abilities more frequently.
Unlike in Dark Souls, you won’t absorb the essence of your enemies automatically. In order to gather the floating souls that pour out of dead Genma, you have to manually absorb them into your gauntlet by standing still and holding a button, leaving you temporarily vulnerable. Souls don’t last very long, so ensuring you can find opportunities to collect loose souls is a key element of Onimusha’s balletic combat loop. There are a lot of layers to Way of the Sword, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the souls.
A Systemic Approach To Martial Arts
Slicing and dicing will only get you so far against the demon army. Onimusha’s combat is all about spacing, timing, and using the environment to your advantage. Musashi has three distinct defensive maneuvers that you’ll need to master in order to survive all the different threats Way of the Sword throws at you.
A redirect is a type of parry that lets you use your enemy’s momentum to redirect their attacks away from you and into hazards, including walls, other demons, and objects in the environment. You can redirect an enemy’s lunge attack to send them flying into a torch, which will set them on fire that may spread to other areas and demons around the battlefield. The more situational awareness you have, the more opportunities open up to you in battle.
Deflect is more like a traditional block, but it has a few advantages. When enemies fire ranged attacks at you, like arrows and shurikens, you can deflect the weapons back to the source, or even deflect them into other enemies. It takes careful timing and practice, but you can effectively bait the bad guys into taking each other out. Deflecting an enemy’s attack also drains their stagger meter, which can quickly make them even more vulnerable to attacks.
Musashi has an omni-directional guard that can block enemy attacks from any side. It’s useful and looks cool, but at the cost of your own stagger meter.
You can also counterattack with an ability called Issen. By swinging your weapon towards an enemy at exactly the right time, you will execute a powerful counter that instantly slices the demon in half. If you continue to input attacks with perfect timing, you can chain multiple Issens together and take out an entire squad in a flurry of perfectly calibrated sword swipes. It’s an extremely cinematic move that lets you make short work of big groups of weak enemies. If there was one mechanic that I would show people to sell them on Onimusha, this would be it.
Call The Edo Period Equivalent Of An Ambulance, But Not For Me!
The live presentation featured Musashi fighting his way along a narrow, linear path gathering souls, deflecting arrows back at archers, and showing off plenty of stylish sword moves. Eventually the path leads to a boss fight encounter against Musashi’s rival and fellow Oni gauntlet wielder, Sasaki Ganryu, who’s a bit of a sadistic prick. During the fight, Musashi aims to cautiously deflect Ganryu’s attacks and steadily drain his stagger meter until he’s able to create an opening for a counter-attack.
Once staggered, Musashi performs a Break Issen, which is a special attack that allows him to choose whether to stab Ganryu in his face, or in his chest. Stabbing his face does bonus damage and breaks his shield-shaped hat, causing him to take additional damage later on, while stabbing him in the chest produces more red souls. Where you’re at in the fight and how confident you feel in your ability will help you determine where to attack, but it’s also a bit like getting a Telltale-style decision point in the middle of a boss fight. Ganryu’s sucking chest wound will remember that.
There’s so much dialogue happening between modern action games and so many nuances in their combat systems that it’s become difficult to pin down exactly whatkindof action game Way of the Sword wants to be. It’s decidedly Soulslike in its progression, but in ways that harken back to the Onimusha games that preceded Dark Souls. It has the technicality and flourish of a game like Black Myth: Wukong, but (seemingly) without all of the different stances and form changes that made Wukong unique. It’s way slower than Nioh, less punishing than Sekiro, and more grounded than Lies of P.
It’s not quite like any of those games, because it’s Onimusha. You may not know or remember what that means, but it’s easy to understand what Way of the Sword is going for when you see it. This isn’t Capcom jumping on the Souslike bandwagon; it’s one of the OGs stepping back into the spotlight to show us how it’s done.
