// PC GAMER — GAMING
Capcom has heard feedback that Onimusha is too easy, says it's 'confident fans will be satisfied with difficulty' in the final game
The behind-closed-doors Onimusha demo at Summer Game Fest was fantastic, but easy.
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A week removed from Summer Game Fest, one of the demos I can't stop thinking about is Onimusha: Way of the Sword. The behind-closed-doors demo was different from the one that's available on Steam—it took place slightly later in the game and showed off one of the game's "open areas" within Kyoto.
Several things stand out in Onimusha: The art, the methodical movement, the sword-wielding zombies, but most of all, it was the swordplay. For all of the comparisons to Sekiro that this reboot is likely to receive, let it be known its melee combat is in another league.
Slices and stabs connect with slow, bone-splitting followthrough. Blades clash, drag, deflect, and spark as if they're laced with fireworks. After years of a FromSoftware brand of floaty, spammy sword swinging dominating the action game, Capcom has dumped resources in the opposite direction: extravagant animations, feedback, counters, and cleaving limbs from their bodies.
It was a great demo—enough that I now can't wait to play the whole thing in September—but it was also too easy.
That was after going out of my way to play on "Action" mode instead of "Story," which my demoist advised against at first. Against the might of Musashi Miyamoto and his Oni Gauntlet, rank-and-file Genma troops weren't much of a threat. They went down quickly, didn't attack all that often, and rarely challenged me to counter instead of dodge. I didn't struggle much at all until the boss fight that ended the demo—a many-armed monstrosity that handed me my ass twice before I figured out his gimmick.
This is where I have to add that I'm not particularly skilled at this sort of game. So I wonder: Is Onimusha too easy? Many seem to think the same of the public demo, so I took the question to the source—game director Satoru Nihei—after my hands-on.
"Both the demo and also the version you've tried here today are early on in the game. So there is that kind of sense that a lot of basic enemies are going to be a bit easier just because of where it sits in the game," Nihei told PC Gamer through an interpreter. "But on top of that, especially with the demo that we released, Musashi comes fitted with a lot of skills and abilities that are not going to be accessible at the beginning of the game."
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