Onimusha: Way of the Sword asks you to pay attention to the world around you as much as the weird things that come crawling out of the ground and take swipes and bites at new protagonist Miyamoto Musashi. After spending three hours hands-on with the game on PS5 Pro, what stays with me is how confidently Capcom is rebuilding the series around atmosphere, movement and building its supernatural Japan as much as welcoming back the swordplay and the Oni Gauntlet.
Creating a believable world is core to making Onimusha’s return feel unique (read my impressions of Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny Remaster for more in this retro series). It’s in the way a ruined village feels frozen in the aftermath of something terrible, its population frozen into stony, tortured statues growing like coral. How a demon-infested street in Kyoto can still feel lived in even as people run in fear from a gaggle of zombie samurai. How a boss design can be genuinely unsettling and somehow ridiculous at the same time, muttering “I hate being hungry” as they try to eat souls.
For me, that balance between history, horror and a slightly goofy approach to its demons’ personalities has always been the appeal of Onimusha. The series has never been purely horror, action or historical drama; it exists somewhere between all three, a place where samurai legends collide with body horror and ancient demons. Way of the Sword understands that balance, but it also feels like Capcom stretching the series a little to accommodate modern ideas, and asking what Onimusha can become now.
My Hands-On opens inside a demon-infested temple, introducing the villains before they disappear and force new reluctant hero Miyamoto Musashi – a real-life swordsman of the late Sengoku and early Edo periods – into pursuit. The chase leads through a village that feels like it has been abandoned mid-scream. Streets are cracked and warped, buildings lean into each other, and the citizens have been transformed into strange stone-like figures, their faces frozen in fear. Once again, the RE Engine that's made Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata so enticing is once again being put to good use.
It’s a subtle, eerie introduction, but what stands out is how quickly the game establishes a sense of place, whether it's the period-accurate detail or the way everything is twisted and corrupted. This isn’t just a backdrop for combat as many Soulslikes can feel; the environment in Way of the Sword feels like it has been interrupted, tainted by something supernatural that’s yet to be revealed, horrific breadcrumbs I eagerly follow.
That trail leads to a crack in reality accessed through 'Oni Vision', and Musashi enters the Genma pocket dimension, and this is where Way of the Sword becomes unmistakably Onimusha. The world breaks apart into a floating collection of fragmented chunks of rock, wooden houses suspended in the air, pieces of stone pathways drifting through space, broken sections of the real world stitched together into something dreamlike. This world sits behind the real one and acts as a gentle introduction to the game’s exploration systems. Musashi can fire arrows into glowing orbs scattered throughout the environment, absorbing their energy into golden containers that can restore damaged areas – broken bridges rebuild themselves, collapsed structures reform and new routes appear.
There are already hints that this will become a larger part of the full game, as some paths remain unreachable, teasing abilities I haven’t unlocked yet, and this demonic dimension suggests a structure built around returning to familiar places with new tools.
But, obviously, this is Onimusha, so the sword comes first. Combat is where Way of the Sword feels like it’s trying to balance several different eras of action games at once. The foundations are familiar: sweeping sword strikes, overhead attacks, counters and carefully timed parries, including knocking arrows from the air with timing. Enemies can be knocked off balance, creating openings for devastating finishing blows. There’s a rhythm to it that rewards patience, watching an enemy commit to an attack before stepping in and turning the fight around.
That sounds familiar because it is, and there’s a clear influence from the likes of Sekiro, but Musashi doesn’t move like a Souls protagonist and Capcom’s design is a little more forgiving, putting cinematic action ahead of the slow tussle of a duel. Musashi is faster, more expressive and much more flexible. He can dodge, change direction quickly, attack enemies surrounding him and link together strings of kills that feel closer to Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden than From Software’s classic. The parries are more forgiving than Sekiro, the pace is quicker, and the game seems less interested in punishing mistakes than encouraging experimentation and enabling its gory finishers.
The result is a combat system that sits in an interesting middle ground between Ninja Gaiden and Sekiro. It borrows the satisfaction of reading enemies and creating openings, but it still wants you to feel like a legendary swordsman and forgives a mis-timed parry and leaves you room to regain a hold on a fight.
That extends to the Oni Gauntlet, one of the series’ defining ideas returning with some extra depth. Defeated enemies release coloured souls that Musashi can absorb, instantly restoring health, charging abilities and improving combat options. Blue souls fill the Oni Armament Meter, allowing special attacks tied to different weapons. It creates a nice tension during fights. Every enemy is both a threat and a resource, something that can push you closer to a powerful attack if you’re willing to stay aggressive.
Exploration feeds into this too, with plenty of hidden boxes containing healing items, stat upgrades and crafting materials littered around the environment, while weapon development and crafting upgrades give you reasons to search corners of the game world rather than rushing through encounters. In fact, the biggest surprise is how much of the game exists beyond combat. I expected a focused action game with limited exploration, and instead, Capcom has created a much fuller version of Edo-era Kyoto that’s ripe for discovery.
The city’s streets are crowded with carts and shops; civilians move through the city, but so do undead samurai, the spectre of that coral-like demonic decay protruding from house roofs and blocking streets. It feels like a place that has been invaded and needs cleaning up.
That’s just what the main missions involve: clearing areas of Oni. Mushashi can break into corrupted areas, slice through low-level demons and undead before confronting a boss. Success unlocks the city area and new missions and collectables. But moving away from the obvious path reveals side stories, unusual characters and smaller moments tucked away in alleyways. Most eventually lead back to fighting demons, naturally, but they give the world more personality and, importantly, give Musashi room to develop.
This version of Miyamoto Musashi is not the silent warrior I expected. He’s playful, confident and slightly reckless, a charming troublemaker who keeps finding himself dragged into saving people despite his best efforts. His exaggerated expressions and animated reactions to being asked to slaughter demons, or generally be helpful, sell that personality in a way that makes him immediately likeable, and he’ll banter confidently with the demons he’s slicing.
The supporting cast adds more colour: the mentor figure, the enthusiastic companion, the serious warrior carrying the emotional weight. They’re familiar roles, but they fit the heightened world Capcom is creating. The bosses are the clearest example of that philosophy. The three encounters I played are wonderfully strange. The first, Daidara the ‘Slavering Glutton’, is a giant horned demon that looks like a huge ball of black fur, teeth and hunger; he’s an enormous supernatural creature that simply wants to consume everything in front of it.
Another, Rashogan the ‘ Wish Warper’, is a demon made from sethered and restitched arms, who twists wishes into tragedies, attacking with everything from grabs to sweeps with a huge sword and tearing chunks of the environment; he’ll even throw a house into the fight. The final boss of my playthrough is perhaps the easiest to defeat as it fights in the most conventional way, but Byakue – ‘Hundred Defilements’ – is still an elegantly realised design, a ghostly samurai covered in what looks like layers of fluttering prayers.
The designs are built around silhouette and personality. Details are hidden beneath thick, inky darkness, with glowing eyes and sharp smiles appearing first. They feel ancient and unnatural, but there’s also a playful absurdity running through them that feels completely tied to Onimusha’s identity.
I went into Way of the Sword wondering if its combat can compete with the likes of Sekiro, but that’s the wrong approach. Capcom’s combat design feels perfectly balanced and neatly judged to be accessible but pliable, maybe not as unforgiving as classic Soulslike, but there’s enough in here, be it in its approach to timed parries, Oni specials, and weapon upgrades, to satisfy. The real question now is how well that larger Kyoto structure will hold across the full game. More exploration gives the series room to grow, but it also introduces the possibility of repetition and overfamiliarity, with a simple ‘clean the zones’ approach to its mission structure. I’d hold off damning it too soon though, as Capcom has yet to reveal how the Dark Realm develops and what’s really in store for Kyoto.
Way of the Sword feels like Capcom absorbing the lessons of the last twenty years, feeding in ideas of open worlds and Soulslikes as well as its own DMC series, updating Onimusha in a modern way.
After playing the demo, the thing that surprised me most is that this isn’t the streamlined samurai action game I expected. It’s stranger than that. Bigger too. The combat has enough depth to make me want to practise counters and experiment with weapons. The world feels built for exploration, but questions remain on how far this will be taken. The bosses are bizarre in exactly the way they should be. And visually, it has that classic Capcom confidence where horror, beauty and complete absurdity can exist all at once. Onimusha has always been about a very specific kind of weirdness. Way of the Sword feels like Capcom remembering that weirdness is the reason people wanted it back.
