// PC GAMER — GAMING
5 samurai movies to watch before playing Onimusha: Way of the Sword
While you were out partying, I was studying the blade (on DVD).
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I wouldn't dream of telling you how to live your life, but if you're planning to play Onimusha: Way of the Sword on September 3, that gives you one weekend and approximately 120 waking hours to fill with samurai movies before the game's release. What else are you going to do—not watch so many classic Japanese films that you intuitively know how to walk the path of the blade the moment you pick up a controller as Miyamoto Musashi? Seems like a bad way to live to me.
But okay, benefit of the doubt: Maybe you're not planning to spend every second of the next week with your eyes peeled open going nuts on the Criterion Channel samurai tag because you have some appropriate gaming plans already established. Perfectly reasonable to devote the hours you could spend watching Akira Kurosawa's whole oeuvre to playing the remasters of the first two Onimusha games, Onimusha: Warlords and Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny, which are only about 3½ and 8½ hours long, respectively. You might even be able to rush through the first game more quickly than you could watch Seven Samurai!
Otherwise I can't think of any particularly good excuses. Job? Eh. Cooking? C'mon. Loved ones? The samurai code demands sacrifice for a greater purpose.
Assuming you're not yet ready to devote yourself wholly to such a singularly focused existence, here's a small selection of great samurai films you can watch between now and next Friday, each of which I think makes for a particularly good appetizer for Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Lemme tell you why.
You're going to spend a lot of Onimusha parrying viciously fast sword swings, the likes of which have never been animated on film better than they are in Sword of the Stranger. This 2007 anime isn't as famous as it deserves to be: one of the best samurai films of the last 20 years, it throws a classic "wrong place, wrong time" ronin hero into a plot involving the emperor of the Chinese Ming dynasty. It's the rare jidaigeki flick to involve foreign characters—both the protagonist and his rival—while still feeling fully centered on the Japanese perspective. The Last Samurai it ain't.
Really, though, we're just here for the fights. Studio Bones, known for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, My Hero Academia, and Mob Psycho 100, put in the work here. Despite the name on the video above, I promise there's even better in the full film.
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Stream on: Criterion Channel | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV