Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, Microsoft Windows
Price: $69.99
Boy, Capcom sure has been on a roll in 2026, hasn't it? Between another successful entry in the long-running Resident Evil saga in Resident Evil: Requiem to branching out with a new IP in Pragmata (though that one wasn't really for me), this storied developer/publisher combo has grabbed this year by the horns. But I have to say, Onimusha: Way of the Sword is their 2026 crown jewel - exceptional combat, mostly exceptional bosses, and a story that's sadly lackluster but is also the sum of several exceptional parts.
I'll also say this...2026 has thus far had two GOTY contenders: Saros and Mina the Hollower.
With this game, the year now has a somewhat-flawed third.
So if you haven't gone out and played it, leave now and fix that. You likely won't regret it.
If you don't think that's going to happen or you just don't feel like stopping what you're doing right now, then read on and see if I can convince you!
Regardless, Onimusha: Way of the Sword (hereafter just referred to as Onimusha) takes place in feudal Kyoto. You are new protagonist Miyamoto Musashi: a samurai (who actually existed) with a Shonen protagonist-level determination to be the best swordsman alive. After a slight disagreement with the students of a renowned dojo leader he killed, our katana-wielding hero ends up being bested by a group of demonic entities known as "Genma," at which point he immediately descends into hell.
A horrific end with an even worse afterparty, wouldn't you agree?
Luckily for Musashi, a mysterious old man in hell gives him a gauntlet graced with the power of the Oni (a Japanese folklore aspect that are usually the bad guys but aren't in this universe, I guess) as a way to send him back to earth and make him even stronger...
Or I suppose I should say: the old man holds Musashi down and forcefully grafts the gauntlet onto him. Musashi firmly rejects it until he's given no choice. After all, getting strong with a magic gauntlet would mean he wasn't getting strong on his own merits!
And so, Musashi returns to earth. At that point, a woman's voice emanates from the gauntlet and tells him to seek out another master swordsman to learn his true purpose.
With mysteries abound, that is where our story begins!
Now...when I tell you that the writing is BAD, I understand that you may start thinking "Hold up! Talking arm accessory? Bad writing? This is Forspoken!"
I, too, had that thought when I played the demo. But having now seen the credits roll, I can say with confidence that Onimusha is not like that.
For starters, there are times where it's intentionally funny. A moment from the prologue comes to mind where Musashi slips in the mud and slides through like 20 guys like bowling pins. Seriously, all it needed was a sound effect and it would've been a slapstick moment! The superb facial capture also accentuates moments like these.
Secondly, the writing is saved from being cringe purely by virtue of how seriously it takes itself. It's more like a B-movie than a The Room situation.
Finally, Musashi's terrible jokes are saved for the exact same reason. It turns out the difference between a "quip" and a "bad joke" is delivery. Rather than eye-rolling irreverence, Musashi delivers these facepalm-worthy one-liners like he thinks he's the coolest action hero ever.
And the voice cast are clearly all in on the joke, which helps!
On that note, I normally play games like this with the Japanese dubbing. But games set in feudal Japan are a dime a dozen now, and I thought switching to English might keep me from losing my mind. That and I knew there was a comedy edge to this from the demo, so I figured English might be necessary for the laughs if laughs were to be had.
And in doing so, I was surprised to hear British accents. My first thought was to complain about that, because, like, are you kidding me?
But then my second thought was of a relevant ProZD sketch...so I reconsidered. I ended up getting used to it, and the English voice cast is actually quite good. So it all worked out in the end!
Surprisingly, in spite of how light-hearted everything I've said likely makes Onimusha sound, things get awfully dark at times. One mission at about the halfway point in particular becomes a horror chapter so affecting that a specific cutscene made my whole body go cold and start shivering. It just goes to show that even if body horror isn't directly shown, exceptional voice acting can make it about ten times worse than if it were.
It's in segments like these where Onimusha saves its writing once again...but in a different, simpler way: It treats them with the respect they deserve. As far as I can remember (and my memory isn't what it used to be), Musashi never once jokes during these segments. Instead, he brings a righteous fury to the table that just happens to not be written very well. But the contrast from his usual self is stark enough to distract from the lackluster script.
Having said all of this, I have to reiterate that the story itself isn't great. In hindsight it seems like it is, but that's just because of some great pieces. But for every great piece, there's a mediocre one.
But first, a note about locations. Onimusha features a central hub in the middle of an incredibly small, rather boring open segment of ye olde Kyoto. This is where side quests and the like show up, and it's also where the uninspired story missions rear their heads. On the other hand, there are far more interesting, far more linear locations elsewhere in Japan that you travel to for the other story missions.
So the way the plot goes is that you'll finish one of those interesting story missions and then come right back to traipse around Kyoto closing at least two "rifts." These "rifts" are magical holes in the air that spawn waves of enemies. Once you defeat all the waves, you hold your hand up to the sky and absorb the rift.
In other words, they're the fade rifts from Dragon Age: Inquisition, but in a boring setting.
Also featured in these missions are giant flowers that must be taken out to clear environmental hazards and two minibosses that you'll fight at least 5 times each over the course of the game's runtime.
After snoozing through these bits, you'll then head back out for something more interesting.
It's all just obvious padding, because otherwise Onimusha would be pretty short...but I honestly think that would have been preferable. Onimusha would've been damn near perfect had it not been so mercilessly padded out.
And in case you doubt that these missions are indeed padding, consider that one of them says "we can't fast travel to this part of town for some reason, so we'll have to walk." There isn't any kind of new threat or cutscene they're trying to steer you towards in this way, it's literally just "we need more runtime, so you have to walk now."
Even when these filler parts are merciful and take you away from the Kyoto hub, all they do is take you back to locations you've already visited...usually for about 5 minutes...before heading back to Kyoto. It's just...so, SO egregious.
I suppose I should begin this discussion by mentioning that Onimusha is NOT a soulslike. We call too many things "soulslike," and it's important to remember that Dark Souls wasn't the first game to feature a dodge/block/parry gameplay loop. Not in any way, shape, or form. Just as it wasn't the first to feature checkpoints you respawn at when you die that also respawn enemies...basically all checkpoints in all games respawn enemies in a way, seeing as how you typically die and start over your progress.
But I digress.
Like in most sword-focused action games, you primarily deal damage with a light and heavy attack. You also have a stunningly powerful bow to get the drop on unsuspecting groups of enemies.
Attacking enemies deals both stamina and health damage, with the stamina bar taking the brunt of it. Once you've depleted their stamina bar, you get to land a critical blow that kills the enemy outright.
Once an enemy is killed, they drop "souls" (remember, it's not a soulslike) of various colors.
Red souls serve as both your currency and one of a few methods of learning new skills. So, about what you'd expect if this were a soulslike.
Yellow souls will heal you by a small amount, with the amount of them dropped being inversely proportional to your health when you cut the enemy down.
Finally, blue and purple souls fill your "armaments" and "awakening" gauges.
"Armaments" are a series of 7 special weapons that each serve a unique purpose. When your gauge is sufficiently filled, you can equip any of these armaments and use them once (or twice when your gauntlet is fully upgraded).
My main armament was a set of daggers that would stagger whoever I used them on and unleash enough yellow souls to fully heal me. Others can cause immense stamina damage, cause immense health damage, whip up a massive whirlwind that can insta-kill entire groups of enemies in one blow, etc.
I only ever used the daggers, so I can't speak to the effectiveness of any other armament...but you might find something else that works for you if you experiment a little more than I did!
As for "awakening"...you'll just have to play the game and experience it for yourself!
Souls have to be manually sucked up with your gauntlet by holding L2/LT. And if you don't do that, bosses and certain enemies will do so and power themselves up.
For enemies, this adds an extra hazard to their movesets.
For bosses, however, this can result in moving on to a phase 2 moveset early...meaning you'd have to deal with phase 2 moves for both the rest of the current phase and the entirety of the second phase. And if a boss has something like a third moveset at the end of the second phase, lord help you if you get your souls taken a second time!
You might now be wondering how a boss can get your souls if souls drop when you kill something. And the answer lies in your own stamina bar.
It isn't a stamina bar in the traditional sense. Attacking and dodging don't deplete it. Instead, you take stamina damage by taking regular damage, by blocking attacks, or by failing one of the five other damage mitigation techniques in a way that results in taking damage or merely blocking.
When your stamina gauge falls to zero, you take massive damage and drop souls. You also often lose your ability to activate your oni armaments or your awakening since the vast majority of your dropped souls will be blue and purple ones.
The first damage mitigation technique is parrying. You press L1/LB around when an enemy attack is about to hit you, which knocks their weapon back to deal stamina damage. Doing this also interrupts whatever hit combo they were going for, with the only exception being a few select moves from boss movesets.
Once you progress to a certain early point in the story, parrying also builds up a separate gauge that eventually sets your sword on fire and causes blue souls to be dropped more frequently by landing hits. This can also have extra effects when used to mitigate damage from unblockable special attacks from bosses.
The second technique is deflecting.
"But...isn't that the same thing as parrying?"
Nope!
Instead, this is done by holding L1/LB, and then pressing the bottom face button at the moment you'd usually parry. This method doesn't necessarily interrupt enemy combos, and using it to mitigate special attacks from bosses doesn't do anything special. But it does deal better stamina damage, and with the correct perk unlocked, it can be used to send projectiles back to enemies.
When you fail these first two techniques by doing them too early, it largely means you just performed a standard block really fast. So, goodbye stamina! If you fail by doing them too late, it means you get hit. Adieu, stamina!
Also, these are best used against weapon attacks, as parrying "unarmed" attacks doesn't have any benefits (like building up the "sword on fire" gauge).
So instead, you should use the third technique: dodging. This obviously doesn't deplete enemy health or stamina on its own, but executing a perfect dodge right before an attack lands activates slow motion and gives you a moment to land one or two hits. With the correct perk unlocked, dodging also builds up a gauge that allows you to unleash a flurry of blows that knocks the target out of their current attack.
The fourth technique is essentially a niche dodge: grab reversals. Sometimes a foe will have an arm, hand, etc, glow blue. This means they're about to grab you, do something unpleasant, and knock a small amount of your souls out. The only way to mitigate this is with a grab reversal, which is just a dodge into the attack. It's the same basic concept as the mikiri counter from Sekiro.
And the final technique is simultaneously the most powerful and hardest technique to pull off: Issen. If you happen to attack at the exact moment an enemy attack lands, you automatically dodge and counterattack, killing them in one hit (or dealing massive damage if it's a boss or elite-level foe). It's so cool to pull off, and with the correct perk unlocked, you can chain it. With that perk, if you press the attack button again at the exact moment your Issen lands, you can select another enemy and kill them in one hit too. Successive tiers of that perk increase the amount of enemies you can do this to in one go, which just makes it even cooler.
That being said, you've never in your life had to deal with timings as strict as the Issen. I could almost never get it to work. Even now that I've gotten much better since practicing on the hardest difficulty, it's still fairly rare that I pull it off against all but the most basic enemies. But it wouldn't be special if it were easy to do, would it?
All of these are insanely fun to do, because it means you're completely clowning on your foes. Don't get me wrong, this gets really difficult with certain bosses. But even when you're on the back foot, it still feels like you're ultimately defeating them by being a bully. You're essentially getting to be the lame friend you played with in elementary school!
"Nu-uh, I knocked your attack away!"
"Nu-uh, I dodged it, you missed!"
"Nu-uh, I knew you were behind me and I *standard child gasp for breath* knocked your attack away without even looking!"
"Nu-uh, I got out of the way and hit you first!"
There's more bullying methods available than what I've discussed, but I'll leave those for you to discover.
It also helps that the enemy loadouts for any given encounter feel carefully curated. Like in Doom Eternal, you'll always find plenty of fodder Genma that can be easily dispatched for some souls. So no matter how many elite-level threats you come across, you're seriously unlikely to ever die in a non-boss encounter.
This has, in fact, led to some criticisms that Onimusha is "too easy." Good golly holly, I'm sick of peoples' obsession with difficulty. But I'll admit to agreeing with a small subset of critics: the game is quite easy...until it isn't.
About roughly 3/4 of the way through the plot, there's one hell of a difficulty spike that I can almost guarantee will knock the breath right out of you. It isn't a difficulty spike for unfair reasons, it's just that the game suddenly starts demanding far more mastery than you're used to having to demonstrate. So you'll get through it...but not before your eyes jump out of your head for a second or two.
...
Even then, the difficulty doesn't lie with enemies. You're seriously, seriously almost never going to die to enemies.
Just about every boss asks you to utilize every tool in your kit to defeat them. They'll throw plenty of weapon attacks for you to parry or deflect. They'll use unarmed attacks to test your dodge timing. They'll unleash devastating grab attacks to keep you on your toes. After a certain point, they'll start throwing unblockable attacks that will deplete your whole stamina bar if you fail to parry or deflect them. And remember: losing that stamina bar means dropping souls. Dropping souls means the boss steals them. The boss stealing them means triggering the next phase moveset early. So failing to perform during these encounters will frequently result in things getting more difficult.
What's more, several bosses also come with a special use case for your bow. For example, there's one fight where the boss uses an inflatable backpack to float in the air when he's about to use his major damage-dealing move. But if you shoot that backpack sometime between when he inflates it and when he launches the attack, you'll instead send him crashing down to earth, dealing decent damage. In another encounter, a boss uses a special thread to lift a house to drop on you. But if you sever the thread with an arrow, the house comes crashing down on them instead!
So the roster is incredible, but even with a lineup as stacked as this one, there are still truly special standouts. Including a fight that does something few developers manage to do.
While I rag on people for attributing basic gameplay facets that have been around since the dawn of time to Dark Souls, it's true that that game popularized the concept of the "gank fight" with Ornstein and Smough...they didn't do a stellar job with that fight, though. And few since then have done well either. There have been some exceptions. The Black Rabbit Brotherhood duels from Lies of P count once you realize that audio cues and an eye for positioning allow you to fight one-on-one. The Cogwork Dancers from Hollow Knight: Silksong are another, with their fully synchronized moveset being the reason. The common theme between every good gank fight is that everyone involved works together with movesets that have a flow to them. It's not just two or more bosses dropped in a room with no regard for each other.
And...well...Onimusha features the single greatest gank fights of all time. There's a not great one fairly early in the plot, but even that one falls under the criteria for a "good" gank fight.
Movesets always tie directly together. In other words, attacks usually happen one at a time. And when they don't, it's because the two attacking together is itself a new item in the moveset.
For instance, rather than two unblockable attacks happening within a second of each other because the bosses are just doing whatever they want, they would band together for a single, synchronized unblockable. And when you parry (not deflect) these, you might trigger an animation where you knock both their weapons into each other, damaging both in the process.
Or to give a more familiar idea of what I'm talking about, consider if Ornstein and Smough were handled the way Onimusha does it. In that circumstance, Smough might slam his hammer down, while Ornstein jumps over him to jab his spear at an angle a second later. And the timing would be the same every time. So your dodge or block would always necessitate the same timing or stamina allotment. It would also allow you a moment to heal or counterattack right afterwards, since the window needed for the two to reset to another pattern would also be consistent.
The final gank fight in particular is one of my favorite fights of the year. But it has nothing on the final boss.
Obviously, going into too much detail on the final boss would constitute spoilers. But it's no exaggeration to say they have a place among the upper echelon of bosses alongside Isshen the Sword Saint from Sekiro and Arlecchino from Lies of P. Both in their difficulty and their exceptional design.
Now that I've spent so much time glazing Onimusha's bosses...it's worth noting that it isn't a flawless collection.
With the egregious padding after every mission comes an egregious re-use of two bosses (not at the same time). Don't get me wrong, they're both fun to fight. But I would've liked to either see more variety in these padding mission or see fewer boss encounters in them overall if adding more would result in weaker designs.
There's also a singular bad one around halfway through that I see come in at the bottom of literally everyone's boss rankings. It doesn't adhere to the same rules that other bosses do, as it entirely relies on only one of your damage mitigation techniques...and Issens I suppose, but you know what I meant.
That on its own wouldn't be too much of a blemish...but the game triples down on it. You fight this boss three times over the course of the plot. And once you see what happens for the second fight, you're going to groan. But I won't spoil that particular surprise!
Difficulty has come up a couple times so far, and I know that might raise some hairs. Some might just want to do cool things and not have their hands go numb from squeezing their controllers. If you're one such person and you don't want to lower the difficulty setting itself, I'll tell you right now that this is the good type of difficulty. When you "get" it, you get it.
The specific example I wrote down in my notes was one of those frequently re-used bosses. The first time I fought them, I got my ass kicked like nine times before I even got 1/4th of the way through their health bar. So, I never saw the last moveset variety in any of those attempts. My winning attempt happened the first time I ever got past that 1/4th mark...and I did the whole thing having only taken one hit.
It's ridiculous, but it goes to show once again that when you "get" it, you get it.
Or for another example, take that exceptionally good but exceptionally difficult final boss. Before all was said and done, I was doing the first phase completely hitless. The only other boss in history I've had that experience with is Arlecchino from Lies of P.
Say it with me, now: when you "get" it, you get it!
This game uses that frustrating UI navigation system where the controller basically acts as a mouse. And both in the character progression screen and on the map, the "cursor" is extremely sensitive. You can't afford to turn the thumbstick sensitivity down because it's just right in gameplay itself, so you're stuck with having to finagle your movements in these menus more than you should.
Without a doubt, the biggest technical flaw in Onimusha is its dialogue mixing. Simply put, there has never been worse dialogue mixing in any game I've ever played. Even when I turned every other volume setting down and turned dialogue up to the max value, 70% of the words would get lost in the mix. Subtitles would be an obvious fix for that, but it's a real shame since using those would mean not looking at the superb facial animations.
Thankfully, the rest of the sound is among the best in the business. Every weapon clash is accompanied by a crisp sound effect, but there seems to be different sounds depending on how big the opponent's weapon is. One gigantic boss' weapon lets out a legitimate thunderclap when you parry it, for example.
Even more impressive is the scraping effect as you parry. You know, like if you clash swords with someone and move your sword in a circle to disconnect the blades and knock them off to the side? That sound effect, which by all rights probably should be annoying, is instead just as gratifying as the preceding *clang*.
On the visual front, Onimusha obviously has those facial animations. And I suppose the graphics are good, but they're in service of ugly padding areas more often than not. Ye olde Kyoto is just one butt-ugly place, it would seem.
It's the same story with the soundtrack, oddly enough. It does its job, but it has no truly standout tracks aside from the final boss theme.
So the presentation is unparalleled at best and merely inoffensive at worst.
As for the baseline technical state, that dialogue mixing is the only flaw. An unflinching framerate, always-loaded textures, ever-present sound effects, consistent animations, and a complete lack of crashes or gameplay-centric bugs all make this an otherwise solid overall package!
Every night since the credits rolled, I've been taking about an hour at the end of my usual allotted gaming time to go through it on the hardest difficulty. It makes for a nice bit of tension relief after a couple hours of Silent Hill: Townfall! I'm also going for 100% completion, though that might be easier said than done! Hell...when it was time to start Silent Hill in the first place, I instinctively went back to the boss rematch area to fight the last couple bosses again for that extra bit of content!
So if you haven't yet had your algorithms flooded with Onimusha content, then let me be the first to tell you to go out and get this, for the love of everything good in this world. I find it hard to believe you'll be disappointed! And if you have seen changes to your algorithm, then let me say the exact same thing but be the 1000th person to say so!
Let us review:
Padding in the story - 0.8
Sound mixing woes - 0.2
The final score for Onimusha: Way of the Sword is...
9.0/10 - Fantastic
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughts? Questions? Think I'm full of it?