Hero image: Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Image: Capcom, via Steam
I still own three Onimusha discs, which feels like a strange thing to admit before I’ve even started, but there it is — Warlords, held together with sticky tape, and two of its sequels underneath a pile of memory cards I have never once needed and also never once thrown out. So when Capcom confirmed the series was finally getting a proper new entry, its first mainline game since 2006’s Dawn of Dreams, I did the thing every collector does and pretended to be calm about it while immediately making room on the shelf.
Way of the Sword drops you into Edo-period Kyoto as Miyamoto Musashi, a real historical swordsman reimagined here fighting his way through a demonic invasion called the Genma, and it doesn’t waste much time explaining why (which, twenty years removed from the originals, I’d genuinely forgotten was always the deal; you absorb souls, you get stronger, you move on, and it works precisely because it’s never pretended to be more complicated than that). What’s changed is how it feels in your hands: the old tank controls are gone in favour of a fluid modern action system, with parrying doing most of the heavy lifting and the timing window noticeably more forgiving than something like Sekiro, which either sounds like blasphemy or sounds like Capcom finally admitting the original control scheme was never the point.
Where it earns the shelf space is the swordplay itself, and I say this as someone who’s played every entry since 2001 and has opinions nobody asked for: the action holds up against the best Capcom’s ever made, spread across a runtime that should really be a sprint (there’s a version of this game a third shorter that I’d have loved unconditionally, and I suspect the people who made it know that too). The soul-absorption loop is back almost unchanged, and there’s something quietly moving about a mechanic from a PS2 launch title still doing the job twenty-five years later.
The honest caveat, because you’re not paying me to just be excited: the fundamentals hold for the first ten to fifteen hours, but the combat options don’t really expand beyond that point, which starts to show over a full playthrough. It’s not a dealbreaker so much as a reminder that a franchise coming back from the dead doesn’t automatically solve pacing, and this one hasn’t, quite.
So: if you were there for the PS2 era, buy it, obviously, you were never not going to. If you weren’t, and you just want a good sword game, it’s still a genuine recommendation — I’d just go in expecting the second half to ask less of you than the first, and be fine with that.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2 and Windows, priced at $99.
Source: JB Hi-Fi, Wikipedia,PC Gamer, Nintendo Life