It’s crazy that Onimusha was left dormant for so long. It’s one of the breakthrough new IPs Capcom had during the sixth-generation consoles era, the PS2, alongside Devil May Cry. While the latter found its massive following and since become the standard to what one expect out of a character action game, Onimusha’s relatively less flashy stylish brand of action was left to history as a cult favourite. Until today.
I remember the crazy hype I’d experience Armored Core VI: Fires Of Rubicon. A long-dormant franchise returning to new greats? A franchise I grew up with specifically loving? Hell yeah. With Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, I feel like I’m in the same situation but now from the outside looking in, as the curious person who is approaching this established, historical series for the first time.
Outside of the original Resident Evil 4, my child self was too much of a wuss to play the Onimusha series back then, and now that its brand of mystical, mythical and the supernatural (with a decent amount of blood, violence and gore) is something I can stomach and play through, I was curious how a new entry to a very specific style of action game you rarely see today can be reinvented in the modern video game landscape.
As it turn out, publisher and developer Capcom has the answer: make a very specific style of action game you rarely see today, using modern tech, techniques, and game design. The result is fascinating blend of cinematic, adrenaline-pumping, punishing-yet-rewarding swordplay action game with glorious boss fights as its main dish, served with open-world-style hub exploration on the side.
Presentation
Capcom has been pushing boundaries with their in-house RE Engine. It’s a capable engine in producing photorealism graphics with high fidelity, but its weakness, as we’ve seen in Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode, Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds, is open world environments. Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is not just playing to the game engine’s strengths, but also took what we players see as a weakness as an opportunity, as the developers really honed in and made some impressive progress in rendering large worlds without hampering graphical performance.
My experience with Onimusha: Way Of The Sword on a base PS5 in “prioritise performance” mode and having it set to fixed 60 FPS is what I expected: no noticeable frame rate drops to the naked eye. Maybe a keener eye or analytical tools would say otherwise. But to a layperson of a gamer, Onimusha runs perfectly fine with nary a scratch to its graphics output. Characters lack a little detail, all screenshots taken here are in “prioritise performance” mode. But it looks good enough and is worth the trade-off to maintain fluid 60 FPS. You can opt to play at a fixed 30 FPS or, if you have a 120Hz monitor, at 40 FPS. The optionality of graphics options on consoles is fascinating to see.
Even if the lighting and texture detail is compromised when targeting 60 FPS on consoles, it still looks amazing. The game does the sleek transition of gameplay cutscene to pre-rendered videos, and while the transition is seamless I can still tell which ones are pre-rendered videos not only because it’s running at a lower frame rate, the quality of the video is less vivid that I can see colour banding and artefacts. The in-game cutscene render (which is a punched-up version of the normal gameplay render with better lighting and more detailed character models, mind) is somehow much better than CGI, now this is a proper ninth-generation console game.
But what really sets Onimusha: Way Of The Sword apart and a cut above its competition is the animation work, and it is by far the most animated AAA game I’ve played so far this year. The amount of different, custom animation, some of which are surely motion captured, for the limited verbs you do in this video game is insane. All you do is swing a sword around but there are so many ways you can split a Genma in half. So many ways you can block an attack. Heck there are so many ways that you can parry!
You still press the same buttons, but the way combat plays out will look different enough the more you keep playing and noticing the ridiculous amount of animation variety Capcom made to make the swordplay in Onimusha to look and feel different to any other action game of its kind.
One of the contextual attacks you can do is to get handsy with the enemy by smacking the head of a dizzied, staggered humanoid enemy. Apparently the animation is changed if you striking an enemy that’s close to a wall, or in the case I’ve seen, a fence, where our hero smack the head of the poor Genma onto the tip of the fence and throw them to the dirt.
You’ll have to parry a lot in Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, and man it’s so fun. More on that later, but what made it spectacular to look at is the amount of ways a parry and a block can look like. Blocking and parrying from the back, one-handed like it’s practically nothing. Dropping to the knees as you barely block a gigantic helm splitter of an axe from splitting you in half, because you missed the parry window and ended up with a late block. It’s just so cool, man. Your main man’s so full of aura he can do whatever and it comes off as aura farming.
Speaking of, Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is made tremendously better thanks to its aura farmer of a protagonist: Miyamoto Musashi. The historical Japanese swordsman is basically the go-to historical figure to present a master duelist from this period in popular culture. His name is presented as family name first, then the given name, as do most of the characters in this historical Japan setting of Edo period Japan.
Capcom made the interesting decision to use the late Toshiro Mifune, specifically his younger self, as the face model for Musashi. The use of a celebrity as a face model isn’t what makes it interesting, Capcom has done this in many of its modern games and in fact, the original Onimusha Warlords featured a celebrity (and two celebs in Onimusha 3).
Using the likeness of a deceased person should be A-OK by me if close relatives, friends, estate or even the deceased person themself before passing are okay with. What really got me interested in that the game also based Musashi’s mannerism based on Mifune’s body of work in samurai cinema. What you get here is one very emotive protagonist, who wiggles the eyebrow regularly and makes use of his cheeks to tell what he’s feeling without saying many words, who you can tell is comfortable or awkward in any social situation by how free or stiff his body movements are, who you can tell he’s just goofing off or when he’s truly locked in and serious just by his mannerisms. Dude just have so much character!
Heck, here are four shots of good faces Musashi makes during the game. Not during cutscenes, in actual gameplay, where you really don’t see these faces up close. I paused and hopped into photo mode and found that they really animated Musashi’s face real good. And yes, the lip sync is synced to the voice audio’s language, and will happen even during gameplay—Musashi is visibly yapping while he sword fights.
Yeah, a lot of it surely comes from performance capture, but that’s the thing: this game features a lot of performance captured animations. Or if they don’t, then surely the animators worked their socks off with so many bespoke looking animations in Onimusha.
Even low-priority cutscenes with less budget and scope, like the ones you see for less important side quests, or the less interesting moving-the-plot talking scenes with the shot-reverse-shot camera angles, don’t feel like it was using a set of pre-canned animations. As much as Musashi emotes with his face a lot, I even saw that happen to an unnamed NPC in a side quest having her face lit up after our hero helped her out with stuff. It’s crazy!
But that crazy amount of work is what you want to see in a AAA game, glimmers of that attention to detail, the things that developers went above and beyond. They aren’t necessary, but when you’re paying a pretty penny worth RM299 for a video game, you’d expect some artisanal quality. And in regards to the animation work, the team that worked on Onimusha: Way Of The Sword deserves their pay (and bonus) for the quality, artisanal work they’ve produced here. Simply a cut above the rest.
When a game has a setting set in Japan like this, I immediately gravitated into having Japanese voices for my Onimusha: Way Of The Sword playthrough. The game also have English dubs, and dubs for a few other languages too, which is nice if you prefer listening in those supported languages.
But the Japanese voiceover work here is tip-top. Musashi has that gruff dude with an attitude that can pull off a “yare yare” quip lackadaisically while being utterly pissed off and brimming with anger inside. One of the recurring rivals, one Sasaki Ganryu, comes off despicable, depraved yet whimsical with his higher-pitched delivery and I mean all this as a compliment—he makes a great foil to Musashi. The character that’s only officially referred to the Oni Lady in official promos, one of the Musashi’s allies that regularly talks to him, has the air of nobility in her voice, like a soothing and calming presence of a Japanese news broadcaster. I don’t speak the language so I can’t judge the dialogue delivery here is good, but it does meet what I expected out of Japanese voiceovers.
The UI in Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is fairly unobstructive, and to a point, barely even there, and that’s what it should do, to never be in the way. I appreciate the restraint in not having two tabs mapped to both bumpers and triggers which can always trip up people because there’s no standard right now on whether the main tab/sub tab should be mapped to the bumpers or the triggers. Just one tab, with little sub menu action. Simple. The map controls can be a little odd as you can independently “scroll” the map (more like pan the map image around) as well as move a cursor. But that’s about what I can write about the UI. Quick, responsive, clicky, clear. The menus are impressively well designed to be out of the way.
On that note, I respect the restraint the development team in marking gameplay-relevant terrain with yellow paint. Some of them only glows when you activate this game’s version of detective vision (Oni Vision), some only glows when you’re close enough to interact with them, while cliff edges and house roofs are left untainted with accessibility goop, you simply intuit that which ones Musashi can clamber above and ones that are blocked by an invisible wall. Now that’s good design, which I guess all the Capcom teams had to learn after sparking the yellow paint discourse back in the Resident Evil 4 remake.
Overall, you will be mightily impressed by the spectacle of presentation Onimusha: Way Of The Sword brings. Top notch graphical performance, strong Japanese voice performance, and impeccable animation work makes it stands out.
Gameplay
In Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, swordsman Miyamoto Musashi is looking to hone his way around the blade and head to Kyoto. He unfortunately met his demise, woke up before being sent to hell to be bestowed upon the Oni Gauntlet without his consent, and woken up in the mortal world again to find Kyoto being run over by monsters. Reluctantly at first, Musashi now has to be an Onimusha, where he slays Genma and suck their souls into his gauntlet, and must stop the forces that’s been sending all these supernatural beings, and other man-made horrors.
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is an action game, and one best not to be pigeonholed into any modern subgenre. It’s been a while since there’s a new Onimusha game and the gaming landscape has changed since then. You don’t have a lot of games with fixed camera perspectives. Survival horror is in abundance. Action games are either a specific niche, or just one component of a bigger open world game. Tough, punishing titles tend to follow the playbook of a particular series of games with a subgenre bearing part of said series name.
If you try to pigeon hole Onimusha: Way Of The Sword through these means, it doesn’t fit. It has level design queues out of soulslike including doors that open only way and limited healing items usable during boss fights, but it doesn’t do corpse runs, or have open-ended character building options and consumables reset if you retry a boss fight. It has parry-driven boss fights, but the tempo and rhythm of the fights are nothing like your Sekrios and Wo Longs and Wuchangs where it’s all about spamming parry all the time. It has, curiously, an open world, but it’s treated more like a hub world you’d see in an Eidos Montreal-made Deus Ex rather than Rise Of The Ronin.
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword makes you remember other modern games, but nothing is out there will specifically play like Onimusha: Way Of The Sword.
I think that’s great! Capcom could’ve just turn Onimusha as their take on a soulslike, but the fact that they didn’t and only take a few parts from it is great! In some way, it’s similar to Onimusha of yore, where it has the conventions of various games of its era, but nothing quite adds up to a similar experience.
At the heart of Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is of course, the sword play. Musashi only fights with the sword, and you’ll grow to love it. The game presents an interesting choice at the start, where you can either map the block/parry button to a shoulder button (L1/LB) or have on the face button (Square/X/Y), dubbed as “defensive” or “offensive”. When you start playing, this doesn’t’ mean much, but it becomes apparent when you discover how parry-reliant Onimusha is.
That’s right, Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is a parry-or-die game!
And before you slap your forehead, rub your temples and groan “oh no, not another parryslop,” let me stop and tell you this. Onimusha: Way Of The Sword isn’t parryslop, it’s parrygourmet.
Here’s the thing with parries in the faster-paced soulslies, they’ve become too fast, too frequent that they ended becoming rhythm games, especially where some of these games don’t even let you initiate strikes. I enjoy my fair share of what haters call parryslop. I’m a parry enjoyer myself, and I do find this fair criticism. Some folks want more agency to the fights, and not just having to come to terms to the ridiculous attack pattern a boss dictates where you can just press the same button over and over again.
Onimusha breaks the cycle a bit by making parries feel good, It’s quality over quantity. You need to get the timing of this 3-hit combo correct, a it has some peculiar pattern, but when you get it, you feel oh-so-great and powerful, because it’s tricky to pull off! You can sloppily block, where Musashi may be seen losing balance or even on his knees as you lose a few seconds of direct control as recovers. You can perfectly parry and nothing happens. But time it right and sparks will fly, Musashi overwhelms the opponent and opens up an opportunity to at least get a three-hit quick slices on them.
The combat flow also shakes up a bit by having not just parry as a button-timed-sensitive verb. You can pull a deflect, which in this game is a specifically different thing, that behaves like a typical parry in parry-driven action games where there’s no follow-up animation. Dodge rolling feels super bad to use in comparison to other action games that relies on it heavily, but it is best employed to avoid unarmed attacks where you can’t parry as those just becomes blocks and drains your stamina meter. There’s also the throw cancel, because why not put throw teching outside of fighting games, amirite? It’s actually brilliant though, even if it’s telegraphed like a mile away, there’s still that sense of dread that you’d hope you press the evade button just at the right time. Similar to fighting games, I find that the best practice is to double-press evade and block/parry, just in case.
So there’s a bunch of options in responding to enemy attacks, sure. What’s stopping it from being parryslop, then? There’s also a high-risk, high-reward attack option in the form of a staple Onimusha move, Issen. Instead of parrying by blocking the incoming attack at the right time, you press attack just before an attack hits for Musashi to just instant transmission, avoid the attack and land a clean hit. All that in flash, it’s in the name, after all. Even better, if you press attack right after the Issen lands, you can chain another Issen. It’s super cool, ridiculously hard to pull off (there’s no button prompt to chain those Issens, you’re on your own in figuring the timing like parries are), and incredibly risky. That one is for the stylish freaks and the bravest fencers that can play action games perfectly. Play sloppily, and you’ll be punished.
You have agency in dictating the pace of the fight, or swing the momentum your way. One way of such is the perfect parries and perfect dodges. The other way is by strategic use of Oni Armaments. These resource meter-based attacks can range from getting back some health to massive crowd control, so they are useful in massive melees as well as boss fights, and you can switch between them all with a weapon wheel. My favourite go-to of these is the stamina-hurting pair of hammers, with a decent invincibility window but still risky if you attempt to charge it to its full power. But when it hits, that usually swings the momentum my way and that’s all I need when engaging in hard, punishing boss fights where tempo matters.
Speaking of, in my demo impressions of Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, one of the things I’ve mentioned was how the tempo of a boss fight is different, and that it lets you room to breathe and make mistakes. Forget that, that turned out to be the wrong take. I have found out through the full game that this isn’t true, just like how everybody who thought the demo was easy.
What is true is that Onimusha: Way Of The Sword rewards perfect play, and vehemently punishes you if you mess up by presenting a wall to climb.
Here’s what I mean. The behaviour of boss fights is that they will press the advantage when they have that opportunity, and the only reason they’ll stall and let you breathe is so that they can recover the stamina gauge you worked so hard in chipping away. They never did it for fair play, they’ve got something to gain when they’re not pressing the attack. You’re not supposed to let that happen, or else you’re going to tango for a whole lot longer.
Onimusha’s stamina gauge doesn’t whittle down on each action, it’s effectively a stagger bar. If an enemy, even a boss, loses all their stamina you get a free hit, with the option of either deal massive damage, or have it drop more souls that can heal you up and refill your other resource-dependent attacks. If an enemy does that to you, you’re the one dropping souls which will deplete the bars for your resource-dependent attacks, and they get the chance to power up.
Bosses in particular will always power up late in the stage, but if you mess up they become more powerful quickly, and now you’re struggling between trying to get back that lost momentum, trying to heal, composing yourself, and also dodge/block/parry the new attack patterns that would’ve come a bit later if you didn’t mess up earlier.
The boss fights in Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is punishing in the way of having a very nice driving instructor teaching you to drive a car, but the moment you make a mistake they go all angry and now you’re flustered and frustrated as they keep on pestering you for not looking at the rearview mirror that one time.
Even wilder, a boss’ attack pattern is much easier to deal with if you can consistently parry. If you for some reason mess up the timing of a perfect parry you alway get right and only did a normal parry, a different attack string that you essentially skipped beforehand will appear and again you’ll be flustered and frustrated. Onimusha loves punishing you for silly mistakes, and make you work hard to recover your footing and momentum when a fight goes wrong. Prepare for some tough love, bucko.
But the tough love is reciprocal. The boss fights flow so well that I can figure out what the fight demands quick enough, and the repetition cycle is all about nailing those parry timings to a T. Many of my failures are just from me not being good enough, moreso when you’re up against that same two recurring mini-boss that I had no problem beating in hour 5 of the game only to stumble in an hour 10 rematch. Yet I appreciate that a lot of these tough bouts, both Musashi and the boss would say something along the lines of “good fight man, GG” just as I was internalising the same thought.
Capcom knows you’ll love the boss fights because just as you clear them, you can go back for a rematch and fight them, again. It unlocks a cosmetic, so there’s a carrot on a stick for it, but it’s mostly there for the freaks who would indeed go back to a boss fight and redo it just to feel something. I wish Armored Core VI (which is an action game that doesn’t fit contemporary genre moulds despite having some soulslike elements in this latest iteration of another long-dormant franchise) had done this.
I personally relish the combat in Onimusha: Way Of The Sword. Call this game “easy” at your own peril, as by mid-way through the game expects you to know the way of the sword, and greatly punishes you at even the slightest mistake. The silly goobers you easily slice down after waiting so long for them to make the first move as seen in the early hours, or the demo, will come back regularly to haunt you and check if you can still consistently hit that perfect parry, or get that Issen Chain for the braver fencers out there, all while under pressure from stronger enemies or pesky archers and floating projectile vomiting. This is “Can You Lock TF In: The Game.” You’ll only get through it at Action difficulty if you play nothing less than perfect, or very good at digging out of your self-inflicted misery like one would do in Tetris.
While boss fights is where Onimusha: Way Of The Sword shines as a parrygourmet, the normal brawls against multiple enemies are still tip-top. Clever enemy placement, a good variety of environmental objects that can be used to turn the tides. You also have a bow that’s very generous with its auto-aim that you can easily get headshots, the risk is that you’re exposing yourself greatly to enemy rushes while you aim for the pesky arches lingering at the perimeter of the encounter arena. You can always get an Issen out of those ranged enemies, which is really cool if you can pull it off. If. Make mistakes in even these low-stakes skirmishes and you’ll see the game over screen. Even these fights can be punishing.
If the idea of gruelling punishment is not your kind of fun, you didn’t sign-up for a torturous soulslike experience after all, you can play at Story difficulty without judgement. The game lets you swap difficulty at any time. The game tries to be really gentle when it does its version of “Easy Mode Is Now Selectable” though not exactly subtle.
Story difficulty doesn’t make the game a pushover. However, it makes all the reflex-based actions easier to perform with a bigger window for registering the right input. It also takes out the guesswork of when is it to parry or when to dodge or when to block a throw by displaying the correct button prompts. Heck, there’s even button prompts to Issen. It still doesn’t make the game a brains-turn-off button masher, but should alleviate some anger should you be stuck and can’t get the parry timing right and just run out of time to really grind through the punishment cycle to get it right. I’m speaking from experience.
(But just so you know, I had it on Story only for the final boss, and I have spent enough time with the game already so I just need to finish the game and put out this review.)
Gameplay-wise, Onimusha: Way Of The Sword’s blade sure is sharp, but that’s only half of the story, as for better or worse, Way Of The Sword is a double-edged sword. The other side of that sharp blade is that there is an open world.
To be fair, the open world of Eastern Kyoto is structured more like a hub world. In fact, the structure of Onimusha: Way Of The Sword feels a lot like Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex games, where you spend quite some time doing stuff in the hub world before unlocking the next set-pieced-filled linear level where you go to a different location. Though Edo-Period Eastern Kyoto doesn’t have the charm of the near-future Detroit, Hengsha or Prague, not necessarily in presentation but in detail.
The town is all spread out in grids, sometimes there are valuable loot to discover, a lot of respawning enemies, and you really just have to sprint across the map for the most of it as you can’t fast travel at any time.
Thankfully, Eastern Kyoto isn’t bogged down by modern open world design tropes. You can climb an observation tower, but you’re making icons populate the map for it. There’s only one collectible type to collect and they’re not only doled out based on story progress, they’re all clearly marked so you can be off with it without much fuss if you choose to engage with it. You even have a waypoint system that directs you exactly where to go to clear off that one marker on the map.
The open world stuff is here as a palate cleanser of sorts, to stop Onimusha from feeling like it just have one good trick that can tire one out. And I welcome such breaks, to a point. More on that later.
A reason to explore beyond the critical path, and spend time in the open world, is for upgrade materials. You can linearly upgrade your stats so that you have more health and stamina, hit harder with the katana, and have a longer meter for your resource-based powers. I find this system to not be as honed in as the rest, though. I regularly find the ultra-rare materials that only dropped in boss fights and for finding designated non-respawning treasure chests. But the supposed common materials like Iron and Hempen Cloth? Super hard to find.
Sure, there is a dedicated shop that sells materials for Oni Souls, your currency, but they are too pricey so you’ll need to grind out and kill those respawning enemies if you want to clear stock out. But Oni Souls barely matter, as skill upgrades that use them don’t cost as much, so I’m not incentivised to really stock them a lot. And worse of all, it’s only by the endgame, where the difficulty is ramped up significantly, do I notice the utility of having my equipment upgraded. For so long it doesn’t feel like it matter, either because the enemy power creep is lock in step with my upgrading pace or I just compensated enough with raw parrying skill.
I don’t think the upgrade system is a terrible idea altogether, but its symbiosis as part of the game economy and open world exploration systems don’t interlock as tight compared to the masterful work that was put through the combat system and action set-pieces. Plus, I think it affects a bit of Onimusha’s overall pacing, as the game feels a little too padded out early on. More on this on the next section.
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword’s combat system is top-class, especially if you love your parry-or-die games. It borrows some elements of modern video games, but without fully committing to a specific sub-genre, yet its swordplay stands out the most thanks to elaborate animations, satisfying feel and the amount of options you get on defence and offence to not make it feel like a one-note parryslop affair. The other systems like the open world and upgrade economy, unfortunately, lags a little behind.
Content
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword runs a little longer than your typical Capcom single-player game. I clocked it out at 31 hours to reach the credits roll.
A lot of it is due to the open world fluff. You really just running around Eastern Kyoto for the a good chunk of the game. Which leads to what I consider as pacing issues. I get that the game wants to spread its linear levels apart, but in the first 20 hours I was just waiting if they’re going to trickle more in as they drop them so rarely, but by the home stretch I just wish the game would end and stop having me go through the linear levels.
It’s not that the open world parts are too much content, it’s actually pretty light—it’s no Rise Of The Ronin in this regard. And the game even tries to pace out the open world by unlocking the full map in chunks. But I still feel like the early parts of the game dragged on too much.
Completing Onimusha: Way Of The Sword will unlock new content. If you’re weirded out on why they have a Change Appearance menu with not much cosmetics to unlock, the good news is is that it isn’t solely because there are paid cosmetics. Some of them are kept behind playing the game at the more difficult Carnage difficulty. While not labelled as such, there is New Game+ mode where you can carry over select upgrades over to a new save.
I initially thought that there’s really not much story going about in Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, but it does have something to chew on. Musashi has a story arc of him wanting to be sword purist and initially rejecting his Oni gauntlet and then discovering what’s at stake, him forming bonds with the unlikely allies he has. Even the villains, as purely evil as they can be, are somehow makes you want to see them more. Onimusha made one of the most scariest villains out of an old, wrinkly Japanese man is a fantastic creative choice. Never have I felt shaken to the bone, and laughing, watching an uncannily smirking uncle happily dance away in glee in a pool of blood.
Speaking of, you can expect some horror elements to the story of Onimusha: Way Of The Sword. The series has roots stemmed out of Resident Evil after all, and there’s at least one level where this Capcom team channel that Resident Evil energy, complete with having a resident evil lurking in a horrific building of body horror. Nothing too gruesome, I did play through it all without suffering much trauma. But just a heads up.
Personal Enjoyment
I’ve mentioned earlier how I avoided Onimusha when it was the new hotness. The series was described by press of the time as another Resident Evil-adjacent experience, and it sort of is, as it was borne out of an attempt to make Resident Evil 4, and child me had way too many nightmares of fixed-camera-perspective games where you face the horrors. The only thing I remember fondly about the series is how in one entry they got French actor Jean Reno to play a character who found themselves in a world infested by Japanese mythical horrors.
So I came in to Onimusha: Way Of The Sword as a complete newcomer to the series. And I feel absolutely welcomed by it.
The other thing that longtime readers who follow me know by now, is that I’m a big fan of games with parries, specifically the ones with more lenient timings. Not the Street Fighter III 3rd Strike kind of parries, or the parries in Dark Souls, but the parries and/or deflects of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. The former has parries as a really tough move to pull off that’s totally okay with you ignoring it altogether. The latter are games where parries are paramount in order for you to not die. Parry-or-die games as I dub them.
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is a parry-or-die game that hits all the bars I expected it to, without all the necessary baggage of having to be a soulslike. I find my time getting stuck at boss fights as fun challenges to overcome, a motivation to get me focused and get into that flow state. Sure, the feeling of messing up, especially when you had a near-perfect rally only for that last-minute slip-up ended the fight not in my favour, is incredible painful. It makes me heated, angry sometimes. But the moments of awestruck when I got the timing right, I got into the flow, I read that boss like a book, I calmly aura farmed by doing more of those Issen attacks (usually unintentionally). Those moments really got me going. This game’s just the best at making you feel you did something really cool, because you do see the fights play out into something really cool.
The last few times I had this rush after beating bosses are with Wuchang and before that, Armored Core VI. The last time I had the urge to go back to a boss fight and just redo it for funsies is Armored Core VI. Somehow, Onimusha is stroking the exact spot of my brain that Armored Core VI did with its lavish boss fights, which should explain why I really fell in love with Onimusha this hard.
To put it into another perspective, the moment I got the code to review Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, I also have a few other titles that required reviewing. After the first few hours, I dropped everything and locked in to Onimusha. That’s how much I’m smitten by it. This game feels so good, man.
I’ve made it known already that I don’t really like “Way Of The Sword” as this game’s subtitle. But it earns it. There are a few story moments where not only the game name drops the subtitles, but pontificates what it means by it.
One of the takeaways Musashi got for fighting the good fight, embracing his role as Onimusha to take out all these Genma? “Because it sounds like fun.”
And that is what ludonarrative harmony means: the game’s message is expressed by telling the players and having them experience it themselves. To Musashi, to you the player, and to some extent the enemies you take on, it’s all about having fun.
If you’re the kind of person who sardonically says “we’re having fun, we’re having fun” when you’re clearly not enjoying a relentless beatdown or a string of bad luck not in your favour, Onimusha is not the way of the sword you swing by. While I rate this game highly, I don’t think everyone should give it a go. This one’s for the parry sickos that can tolerate punishment.
Verdict
Like a well-timed Issen, Onimusha: Way Of The Sword precisely strikes hard, quick and just at the right moment. A challenging, rewarding action experience for those who want to feel cool, feel powerful, and those who just want to feel something out of a modern video game as it isn’t afraid to punish you hard on your mistakes.
Onimusha more than earned its due revival, and the development team did the series right with this incredible new entry thanks to cutting edge animation work, sword fight mechanic and boss fight design.
Played on base PS5. Review code provided by the publisher.
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword
Onimusha more than earned its due revival, and the development team did the series right with this incredible new entry thanks to cutting edge animation work, sword fight mechanic and boss fight design.
- Presentation 9
- Gameplay 9
- Content 8
- Personal Enjoyment 10