By Aegis Malkav 
After 20 years of slumber one of Capcom’s most iconic franchises is finally back with a vengeance, get ready to be dragged into the eternal war between the Oni and the Genma with Onimusha : Way of the Sword.
Oh boy, the bias is gonna show in this review. I’ve been a fan of the Onimusha series since I first played it back in 2001 during the PS2 era and I couldn’t be happier to see it making a comeback. I’ll try my best to be impartial but I won’t make any promises.
Developed by Capcom, Onimusha: Way of the Sword is an action RPG where sword fighting is the main focus of it, back then the franchise was a hybrid of fixed cameras and horror elements of games like Resident Evil and heavy focus on sword-based combat from Devil May Cry, it became a cult classic as a great Horror Hack and Slash with puzzles series during the PS2 era where I was a fan of it until this day.
If you never played the original ones it’s ok because Way of the Sword takes place on a different universe where the events of the previous games never happened tho the primary entities that are at war since the beginning of times are still present: The Oni and The Genma.
The game story takes place in the early Edo period in Japan ( More specifically in the city of Kyoto ) where you play as the historical and real swordsman known by many names such as: The Sword Saint, The Peerless one, The strongest swordsman in history and certified gigachad Miyamoto Musashi.
You start the game with Musashi challenging another important historical figure which is Kojiro Sasaki, after fighting him and his school students you end up in a situation where you first encounter the human eating demons The Genma. Incapable of holding back their otherworldly strength you end up stabbed everywhere and as result you die, while your soul is getting dragged to hell a man dressed in white stops you from falling into hell offering you a gauntlet with the power of The Oni inside it in order to come back and get revenge against The Genma, obviously you refuse because you’re a human that lived by the sword and for your own strength and you find it repulsive depending on a strength that doesn’t belong to you, well despite telling him no he ends up forcing you to wear the gauntlet and as a result you come back to life, with newfound strength despite not liking it you’re now more than
capable of facing The Genma and so your journey to stop them begins.
Let’s talk about the graphics first, the game uses the RE Engine which in my opinion is one of the best engines out there making it look incredible even if you have a Series S, the game offers graphical options for those that are very picky about what they want. For example you have the option to prioritize between performance (FPS) and quality (Resolution) with the option of running it at 120Hz if your TV has the specs for It, the characters looks incredibly expressive and lively specially Musashi which is clear where the devs put more effort into. The game offers two difficulties at the beginning: Story and Action.
Story is what I like to call the “Gaming Journalist” difficulty which is meant to not put any strains and make the journey as easy as possible for you in order to enjoy the story without getting frustrated.You deal more damage, the enemies deal less damage, the window for parries and dodges are wider and you have action prompts enabled by default.
Action is the intended difficulty of the game and the one I’ve been playing with, basically everything that story difficulty offers is taken away in this one and makes the combat more tight and reaction based.
There’s a third difficulty that only appears after you complete the game and that’s Carnage: If you have the audacity to play the game on this difficulty I must let you know that you’re gonna die a lot! Not only the bosses behaviour and patterns changes but also you’ll die in a single hit no matter how trivial the attack is so unless you develop Ultra Instinct you’re gonna have a tough time going through this ordeal, oh yeah i forgot to add that once this difficulty is selected you can’t change it back so have fun.
The combat is the star of the show here so as a result the amount of options when fighting that the game offers you can be overwhelming at first but luckily you won’t unlock most of these features until you’re hours deep into the game, ill go through the essential ones since not only there’s so many features that this review would be as long as a book but also some of them can only be unlocked after something in the story happens so to avoid spoilers ill have to keep it simple.
We’ll start with the basics: Musashi can deal horizontal and vertical attacks, horizontals are fast but easier to block while the vertical ones can break the enemies guard but can be dodged easily so you’ll have to change swings accordingly.
Then there’s blocking: You can block most of the attacks but at the cost of your stamina bar which when it breaks it will leave you vulnerable against enemy attacks so be careful. Next is the parry: If you block an attack right away before it hits you’ll perform a parry, not only will significantly deplete the enemy’s stamina but also it will create an opening to land some good hits but remember that the parry won’t work against unarmed attacks or grabs. Now is time for the dodge system: You may think that dodge isn’t needed if you learn to parry right? Wroooooong!!
Dodge is also necessary to master in order to counter unarmed attacks such as kicks or punches but also if an enemy tries to perform a grab and you dodge it at the right time then you’ll activate a guard break which is a move that leaves your enemy vulnerable while you’re also aura farming in the process.
Now I’m gonna talk about Broken Issen: Broken Issen is a state that when the enemy is out of stamina Musashi can perform a special attack that can basically kill any regular enemy and do something a bit more special against bosses which I’ll explain later.
Blade Barrage: If both you and the enemy clash attacks at the same time you’ll enter a Blade Barrage animation where both of you will start exchanging blows in a rock/paper/scissors situation where you have to decide if your next attack is gonna be light or heavy, guess right and you’ll break the enemy dealing him damage and leave him stunned for a short time. Blade Locks: It’s an animation that sometimes happens when you either parry or deflect an attack letting you both clash with your swords and rubbing them (pause) anime style but the objective here is simpler than with Blade Barrage, simply button mash both light and heavy
attacks as fast as you can, whoever loses the sword clash will be taken a serious amount of stamina as payment so you better mash it fast.
Blazing State: After parrying enough attacks your sword will be coated in blue fire and you’ll enter in a blazing state where both the damage and the stamina loss that you deal will increase exponentially but this is a temporary state so make sure to make the most of it.
Since you’re also part Oni it’s fair to also talk about some (but not all) of the Onimusha Powers that you’ll unlock as you progress through the story.
First and most important is the Oni Gauntlet: After defeating the enemies you can feed the souls of the defeated Genma to the gauntlet to become stronger and there’s 4 types of souls: Red souls are the most common and they work as an upgrade currency that will help you become stronger and unlock new abilities. Yellow souls are meant to heal your health bar, the less health you have the more yellow souls will heal, Blue souls are meant to fill your special bar that’s used for the Oni Armaments and lastly Purple Souls which they’ll fill your Oni Awakening bar.
Oni Armaments: They’re special weapons created by the Oni where each one has their own gimmick, unfortunately you can only unleash an attack from those weapons when you fill the special attack bar to the max.
Oni Vision: It’s basically the detective mode in the Batman Arkham games, it lets you see what’s hidden in plain sight, you’ll know most of the time when to use it because the gauntlet will start glowing.
Oni Awakening: Musashi merges with the gauntlet and becomes an Oni, you’re invincible to any attack and don’t lose any stamina either, the form obviously is temporary but can be extended by connecting Issen attacks filling your bar and prolonging the form during hard fights, this is your trump card and should only be used as a last resort specially against Bosses.
Bosses here are the main attraction of the game and come in several flavors: You have giant bosses, humanoid bosses and non-anthropomorphic bosses, each one with their own gimmicks and trials to overcome but they have one thing in common, reduce their stamina to zero and they’ll enter in a special Break Issen animation where it presents you with two choices: Slash the red part of the boss to deal a stupid amount of damage or the purple part which won’t deal as much damage but it will release a large amount of different coloured souls so you’ll have to decide which one you need the most when it happens.
I’ve only explained around half of the combat features that the game has so you can imagine how extensive this is and why I only decided to cover some of them, now finally we can move on to the exploration and leveling up system of the game.
The majority of the game and therefore its exploration revolves around Eastern Kyoto and the nexus where most of your improvement will take place is the Rokudo-chinnoji Temple. First we’ll talk about the main source of healing and buffs in the game and these are the Hozuki Pouches: At the beginning you’ll only have the healing type which acts as “Estus Flask” and heals a certain amount of health instantly but through the game you’ll unlock other types such as the Regeneration type that recovers both healing and stamina over time, the Aggressor type that refills both the Oni and Reflex bars, the Resistance type that regenerates both health and Oni power simultaneously and finally the Awakening type that fills both the Oni Armament and Oni Awakening bars, keep in mind that you can upgrade the amount and effectiveness of the pouch by searching for regular and Oni materials scattered through Kyoto.
You also have consumable items that will grant buffs, healing and debuffs to enemies, you can select what items you want to carry with you for use in the storage menu inside the Spirit Mirror.
Charms: These are the stat boosts accessories that will improve stats like the healing that the Hozuki Pouch can provide, stamina lost when hit by an enemy attack, blaze gauge increase rate and much more so it’s up to you to decide what charm suits your playstyle the most.
Spirit Mirrors: These are essentially the “Dark Souls bonfires” of the game and allows you to fast travel to unlocked locations, level up equipment and abilities, save, manage items stored in it, change Musashi, his sword and other key npcs appearance and finally you can also change the difficulty level of the game.
Enma’s Hall: This statue can help you level up your charms but the lord of hell is a picky mofo and he will only help you if you incur his favor in the form of offerings while also paying with Red souls.
Training Grounds: A space where time doesn’t pass and serves as both ability training and boss rush, you should come often here not only to refine your combat skills but because completing several training and bosses again will give your rewards in the form of upgrade materials and character skins.
Equipment / Abilities enhancement: Here you can strengthen your character by gathering specific materials that you’re going to find by exploring, doing main missions, side quests etc.
I’ll do a brief explanation of each one so you dear reader can have an idea of what to expect.
Equipment / Ability Enhancement Examples:
- Clothing: Improves Health and Stamina
- Sword: Improves regular attack power,Issen power and Oni armament power.
- Gauntlet: Improves maximum Oni power and Soul Absorption/Range.
- Basic Skills Tree: Improves the physical abilities of Musashi, soul absorption, number of charms, equippables etc…
- Special Skills Tree: This one is to improve everything that has to do with Oni powers such as the Oni Vision, Armament, Awakening etc….
Now it’s time to talk about the map and what you can find.
At first you have the main story mission called Way of the Sword which follow the events that i explained briefly at the beginning, then you have side quests that are a good source of material for upgrades, random encounters that may trigger during your exploration of the city where you have the option to help citizens from Genma enemies and get rewarded for it, lastly there’s the Oni portals where after a brief trial you’ll unlock more Oni skills in order to expand your arsenal even more.
Keep in mind that the whole map won’t be available at the beginning but it will when you start completing the main story giving you access to areas that were impossible to get before. The game will take you between 30-35 hours if you do the side quests and everything else.
Finally, I’m going to talk about the game’s flaws while there aren’t many It’s still fair to point them out since this review is based on my personal opinion after all.
The exploration lacks depth, most of side quests, Oni portals or rescuing townspeople revolve every time into finding a group of random Genma, kill them and repeat which makes It tedious after the first couple hours.
I also don’t like that they got rid of the weapon choices that the series was known before, yeah the swordfights are amazing but in previous titles you could find twin blades, naginatas or greatswords imbued with elemental powers that you could upgrade further after feeding them souls and it’s a shame that this game doesn’t have the same variety.
Outside Musashi there’s very few characters that have the same depth and charm poured into and as consequence can make the story less memorable.
Lastly and this is what have the fanbase divided between the people who love It and the ones who hate it is the sudden change in genre, like i mentioned before this franchise was known to be a hybrid between survival horror and hack and slash with some puzzle solving and with this latest entry Capcom decided to throw it out of the window and make another action RPG which in my opinion its becoming an oversaturated genre and losing its identity in the progress.
Overall Onimusha: Way of the Sword is an incredibly well made game that not only put the franchise back in the radar after 20 years but did it so well that I consider this entry a very strong candidate to become game of the year.
I had an amazing time playing this game and it’s easily one of the best titles I’ve played in recent years. I hope this is the beginning of a bright future for Onimusha, get your copy of the game and destroy every single Genma with extreme prejudice!
Thank you so much for reading so far, my name’s Aegis and I’ll see you all in the next wall of text.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword Xbox Review – A Stunning Return
+ What works
- Sword combat on par with masterpieces like Sekiro
- Impeccable graphics
- Charming main character
- Audio & World Design is Perfect
− What holds it back
- Side content becomes repetitive
- Extreme change in genre can be detrimental for longtime fans
- Lack of weapon choices
- Available on
- Xbox Series X|S · Xbox PC · Windows PC · Cloud Gaming
- Developer
- CAPCOM CO., LTD.
- Publisher
- CAPCOM CO., LTD.
- Release date
- 4 September 0026
- Age rating
- PEGI 18
- Price
- £64.99 / $69.99 / €79.99
Jordan Campbell
Fletcher Wilkinson