Fear not, samurai masochists, Onimusha: Way of the Sword's flashiness hasn't replaced its challenge

Last month, I played an extended preview of upcoming action slasher Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and came away impressed - if a bit sore in the fingers. Though the samurai action genre is a crowded one these days, with Nioh 3 doing an excellent job of claiming the current throne, Onimusha has more than a few intriguing tricks up its yukata sleeve.

The Onimusha series - whose last instalment released in 2006 for the Playstation 2 - began life as a Resident Evil spinoff, and it showed. Katana fights replaced the ammo-scarce shooting, but the careful, methodical cadence remained. Slice down a spooky Genma (that's a demon) here, dodge an attack there, weave into another area as the camera makes a jarring shift to a new fixed angle above you. Absorb souls into your gauntlet to gain new powers, rinse and repeat.

Way of the Sword does an admirable job of replicating this vibe, with concessions fit for 2026. The fixed camera angles have been replaced with the behind-the-back view that Capcom's RE Engine has gainfully employed in every Resident Evil remake (and a couple of mainline entries) thus far, but the battles still burst with a degree of intricacy far beyond what Leon Kennedy and his peers are capable of.

The preview I played picks up shortly after Way of the Sword's demo, which is currently available on Steam, if you'd like your own taste of what Edwin called a "moody demon parry fest". Indeed, this game is engineered for Soulslike deflection sickos, but neither Sekiro or Nioh had a main protagonist modeled after a young Toshiro Mifune, the legendary actor who starred in such Japanese cinema classics as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo.

Onimusha's always made it a point to feature leads wearing the faces of popular stars, from Taiwanese/Japanese heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro in Onimusha: Warlords to Jean Reno, of all people, for Onimusha 3: Demon Siege. It apparently took two years for Capcom to secure the rights to Mifune's likeness for Way of the Sword, and he's a worthy Miyamoto Musashi, making contorted expressions at all of the yokai shenanigans surrounding him with a swagger that belies a fun mix of confidence and the resignation of a man who knows he's going to spend the entire following day nursing a sake bottle.

This Mifune-faced Musashi also deals with obstacles out of the traditional action-adventure playbook, rather than the strict Soulslike blueprint. I traversed a brief dungeon that felt like Baby's First Zelda, with Musashi needing to shoot the correct symbol on platforms with his bow to make them fall down.

Then there was the city of Kyoto, which acted as a hub with small missions branching out within its borders, and a few NPCs who would offer up items if Musashi saved them from Genma attacks. Collecting items lets Musashi gather a resource called Favor, which he can then use to upgrade his gear, so while none of these missions were particularly original, at least they had a point.

Make no mistake, though - Way of the Sword's beating, bloody heart is its combat. Musashi moves and fights with a grounded fluidness that's as satisfying to the eyes as it is to the gamepad-grasping hands, and while his moveset is Soulsy, there's a dash of Character Action Game cool factor in here as well, a la Ninja Gaiden. Most basic enemies go down easily as sacrifices to Mushahi's rad dude aura, and the parry window is much more forgiving than it is in both Nioh and Sekiro.

Riposte play, in particular, comes with some fancy bells and whistles. As in previous Onimushas, Musashi can pull off an Issen technique: a counterattack delivered just before an enemy strikes, potentially triggering an insta-kill. It seems like you may be able to play through the entire game only relying on Issen kills, a fact that Capcom is already advertising on social media. Also, if you succeed on a prolonged parry, depending on your timing, the camera might zoom in to highlight the dazzling sparks that erupt from crossed blades, and then swivel around as Musashi manoeuvres his opponent into a nearby hazard.

In general, the environment is interactive to a great degree, as if it's the 2000s again and Capcom just started experimenting with the Havok Physics engine. Case in point: one of my parries knocked a Genma into a nearby rack, after which a sheet fell on its head and blinded it, letting me get the perfect kill in. Other battlefields are littered with boards and carts, the latter able to serve as makeshift shields against arrow volleys, while the former can be pushed into incoming opponents, scattering them like demonic bowling pins.

"Cinematic" is one of the most exhausted buzzwords in games, but these zoom-ins and environmental effects, combined with Mifune's hyper-detailed visage, all make Way of the Sword genuinely more film-like than its fellow swordswingers. This is especially true during the boss battles, which sometimes smash the camera into close-ups of Musashi's blade smashing against his enemy's, or swoosh it around the baddie as they begin unleashing their ultimate attacks.

Some folks have been worried about Way of the Sword toning down the difficulty a little too much, since the demo is a relatively breezy affair outside of a battle against Musashi's rival, the cackling, metal-hatted Ganryu Sasaki. They can rest assured that the three bosses that I faced in my playtime were properly challenging, especially a multi-armed asshole named Rasho-gan.

A sadistic trickster who manipulated Kyoto locals into sacrificing their body parts, Rasho-gan battered me with two forms. He possessed an attack where he ripped up trees, rocks, and other parts of the arena to chuck at me, alongside a host of moves that could all be parried, but required expert timing to do so. If he's any indication, the bosses in this game will indeed be capable of putting up a Sekiro-level fight, though at least Capcom has the good will to insert a Story Mode difficulty for those whose reflexes have dulled in the intervening two decades.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword releases on 4 September, and I suspect it's got a good chance of continuing the hot streak that Capcom established with Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata. Whether it can also meet Nioh and Sekiro's standards of Edo-era excellence remains to be seen, and again, we've come a long way since the PS2 days - but either way, this is looking like the kind of franchise revival I can get on board with.

Newspaper

Fear not, samurai masochists, Onimusha: Way of the Sword's flashiness hasn't replaced its challenge

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