Onimusha: Way of the Sword Review

I feel confident in stating that Capcom is very much in the middle of a generational run for development and publishing, their games have been critical darlings, move large numbers of units and even though this Capcom renaissance may have started with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard the continued success isn’t from leaning on their most popular franchises like Resident Evil or Monster Hunter. They’ve been creating completely new games that tell unique stories with fresh perspectives, in doing this Capcom are broadening their already expansive IP catalogue even further with games such as Pragmata, it’s reached a point that Capcom’s name being on a game is essentially a seal of approval for wide range of people and Onimusha: Way of the Sword doesn’t look to change that, having sold over 1 million copies within the first day of release, and just coming off getting every achievement in the game I can confirm that this game deserves all of the hype that it’s garnered. Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a brand new entry in the well received Onimusha series, initially beginning on the PlayStation 2 receiving a numbered trilogy and a subtitled 4th entry. In the recent years we’ve seen remasters of the first two games in the trilogy with Onimusha: Warlords and Onimusha: Samurai’s Destiny being brought to modern systems. Thankfully you do not need to have played any of the previous games to jump into Way of the Sword.

The story follows legendary samurai; Miyamoto Musashi, based on a real life samurai that is revered worldwide for his swordsmanship and for his undefeated duel record, as we begin following the in-game Musashi as he challenges and humiliates the leader of a samurai dojo, crippling his sword swinging hand in the process. In doing this the students watching on look to take revenge for their fallen master and we have a somewhat comical series of events of Musashi running away from the students and attempting to sneak past and avoid killing any of the students (as much as possible) all while it’s pouring of rain.

This sequence felt like Capcom flexing the muscles of their RE Engine, which is their in-house engine that’s used for essentially all of their games these days, ranging from Street Fighter 6, to Dragon’s Dogma 2, and even Monster Hunter. What stuck out to me the most throughout the entire sequence was the way that the mud stuck to the clothes and faces of the characters, by the end of the cutscene Musashi and even the students chasing are filthy covered in mud, and that’s not to forget the facial animations, you can feel the time and effort that were put into the facial animations and it’s paid off handsomely for the games presentation. They stoodout to me as if Capcom were forcing me to take notice. After escaping the vengeful students Musashi runs into his rival Sasaki Ganryu, just as they are about to commit to another duel they are both struck down by entities known as the Genma, which I can only describe as low level demons that feed on humans.

Waking up in hell Musashi is confronted by a “Man in White” who outfits him with what we’ll learn to be the “Oni Gauntlet”, sending him back to the land of the living and giving him the power to destroy the Genma that had just struck him down earlier, kicking off our journey as the voice inside our gauntlet tells us to seek out the mysterious swordsman, Takamura, after finding him and his apprentice Okuni, we are informed that Musashi has been chosen by the Oni to be a protector of the gates of hell and is now known as an “Onimusha”, our objective is to stop the “Man in White”, real name Yoshitsune from escaping the pits of hell and not allowing him to wreck havok in the mortal world, that just leaves us with the question of why did he fit us with an Oni Gauntlet and revive Musashi…?

Overall I would say I enjoyed the story, while the overall plot is pretty basic the game shines the brightest with the characters who are strong and memorable, Musashi strikes me as aloof, cocky but holds his values close to his heart and has the singular goal of becoming the strongest swordsman ever, this is shown to us in the beginning of the game as initially he views the Oni Gauntlet with disdain, it’s giving him power that isn’t his own innate strength which he views as cheating. The supporting characters are also memorable, such as the Onimusha teacher Takamura, who is our guiding light on what it means to be an Onimusha and looks to train Musashi in the ways of the Onimusha to keep the gates of hell shut.

That’s not even to mention the enemies and villains of the game such as the villain, Yoshitsune a previous Onimusha who has gone mad with power and was sealed away in hell due to it, the motion capturing and voice acting do a superb job in capturing the depths of his madness extremely well, facial motion capture again being a large part in making the performance so memorable. There is also the unforgettable Sasaki Ganryu, who I viewed as a mirror to Musashi, he walked down the opposite road from our protagonist, he’s what could have been, he was more than happy to accept the power the gaunlet bestows to him, which is the complete opposite reaction that we see early from Musashi as he loathes it being attached to him.

Later when you meet Ganryu again with both swordsmen having their own gauntlets decide to take part in another duel and we’re told that the gauntlets don’t just absorb souls of Genma, they can also be used to absorb the souls of ordinary humans. Ganryu jumps on this knowledge allowing him to become stronger than Musashi for a period of time which pushes doubt into Musashi’s mind, should he sacrifice his humanity to become stronger? It was his goal to become the strongest swordsman. It’s a very interesting dynamic which I found enjoyable, it helped that the voice acting for Ganryu is top notch, I done my initial playthrough on English which I enjoyed but on a subsequent playthrough I switched to Japanese voice acting and found that Ganryu shares the same voice actor as Katsuki Bakugo from the anime series My Hero Academia, where as Musashi shares the voice actor of Reiner Braun from the anime series Attack on Titan. At the beginning of the game I anticipated that the relationship between these two would evolve to be more akin to the relationship of Kazama Kiryu and Goro Majima from the Yakuza series, but Capcom decided a different path for Ganryu.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword gives you many tools to deal with enemies granting the player a lot of freedom in their chosen playstyle

The gameplay in Onimusha is the heart of the game, it’s what elevates it above other games in my eyes. Musashi and enemies share the same two bars, their health bar and their stamina bar. Plain blocking of attacks will lower your stamina bar and if it reaches zero your stance will be broken and you’ll lose a large chunk of health and lose a bunch of souls, I would say relying on this method is just not feasible in the long run but it will help you in some situations where you don’t feel confident enough in the other methods. If you’re not meant to defend attacks how are you meant to fight enemies? Parries are the answer, they are your primary option for defence I found in Onimusha: Way of the Sword, a well timed press of the defend button will see you deflect the enemies weapon strike and give yourself some free time to get hits in, it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t the only way if the enemy decides to use a fist, leg or head to attack you you’ll actually need to dodge as your parry will not work as well giving you less time to launch a counter attack.

There is one last way that you can opt to fight and that’s through the “Issen” system, where I mentioned previously that a well timed block will parry, if you instead have a well placed attack Musashi will instead dodge and immediately attack, dealing a devestating blow to the enemy dealing massive damage to both the enemies health and stamina. Onimusha: Way of the Sword gives you many tools to deal with enemies granting the player a lot of freedom in their chosen playstyle, if you prefer to play defensively you can look to parry and deflect, giving yourself the most openings to get strikes and slowly whittling down their stamina meter to break and get a big damage hit in, but if you prefer to play aggressively you can attack the enemy and look to get those sweet, satisfying Issen hits in, landing them feels immensely satisfying and makes you feel like an untouchable god.

Onimusha’s hub world is serviceable I would say, it doesn’t do much special but gets the job done, if anything I would say it’s the weakest part of the game, gathering resources for upgrades can get very tedius and after running into a group of Genma for the 15th time in the same spawn locations resulted in me just looking to avoid them as I would bee-line to the next story objective.

Capcom have balanced the combat in a way that makes fighting even the weakest enemies in the game fun, the sword play is weighty but not Dark Souls weighty, you’re given lots of options on how to fight enemies and when it comes to the boss fights, it can honestly feel like each fight plays out ever so differently. There were occasions where I would be immediately massacred by a boss, missing all deflects and parries, but upon reloading I would defeat the boss without even being touched it was a very interesting phenomenon to witness, occasionally bosses and enemies will force you into choosing a specific fighting style, but you’re given so many tools that allow you to bend the rules of engagement in your favour.

While travelling between missions you’re given access to the Kyoto area in Japan which has been ravaged by the Genma, this acts essentially as a hub world for you to explore, giving you spirit mirrors as a like your bonfires in Dark Souls allowing fast travel and refilling of your items, gather ingrediants for levelling up your equipment, take on side quests or just train in combat with random encounters. Onimusha’s hub world is serviceable I would say, it doesn’t do much special but gets the job done, if anything I would say it’s the weakest part of the game, gathering resources for upgrades can get very tedius and after running into a group of Genma for the 15th time in the same spawn locations resulted in me just looking to avoid them as I would bee-line to the next story objective. These story objectives are a lot more engaging compared to the open world, new enemy types are introduced, you’re placed into interesting set pieces and they act more as a linear dungeon moving from area to area and solving light puzzles until you reach the boss of the dungeon, which is always the highlight of the areas.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword continues Capcom’s ongoing highlights of the year, they’ve hit a stride of games that I’m sure many companies are jealous of and it was a pleasant surprise to see what was thought to be a forgotten series coming back

Previously I mentioned that Capcom was flexing with their use of the RE Engine with how the game looked in it’s intro cutscene, but during that part I didn’t mention the performance of the game for me and on my system. For me the game ran at, what felt like a smooth 100+ FPS on the highest settings on the Nvidia 5080 and Intel i9-14900k, a high spec machine for sure but I didn’t even feel that my PC’s fans were ramping up when playing, the game felt very well optimised in that regard. There were a couple of times that my game crashed what felt randomly, like opening a door and the game would just freeze, not entirely sure what caused these crashes but I was able to send the crash report to Capcom and then reopen the game and continue on fine, in my total time of around 80 hours playtime (100% completion) the game crashed around 3 times in total.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword continues Capcom’s ongoing highlights of the year, they’ve hit a stride of games that I’m sure many of their peers are jealous of and I would be lying if it wasn’t a pleasant surprise to see what was thought to be a forgotten series coming back, especially with Capcom mentioning that they are actively looking to reviving their dorment IP which bodes well for my fellow Dino Crisis fans. I would highly recommend Onimusha: Way of the Sword, if you’re worried about the game difficulty being too high, the game does offer the choice for an easier mode so you don’t need to worry about the combat being too hard and immerse yourself in the world and chain your Issen’s to feel like the ultimate samurai.