// KOTAKU — GAMING
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword: The Kotaku Review
Action-AdventureCapcomOnimusha: Way of the SwordOpen world
Onimusha is a particularly challenging franchise for Capcom to revive, as it exists somewhat out of time. It’s built on top of the design foundations of Resident Evil, and its development directly inspired Devil May Cry; it is, in a sense, the missing link between what Capcom’s 3D action games were and what they would become. This left the series in a weird spot after the runaway success of Devil May Cry, attempting to find some way to hold on to its identity, its entries growing longer and less focused even as the genre moved in a very different direction, until valiantly giving up the fight in 2006.
And what was that identity? Its first pillar was one of pure cinematic ambition. Onimusha games cast real, star actors in grand, digital Jidaigeki: Takeshi Kaneshiro was the series’ samurai hero Samanosuke, Jean Reno was a time-travelling French policeman. Way of the Sword, the series’ first entry in 20 years, certainly continues this need to borrow star power in a show of cinematic legitimacy, with the somewhat questionable decision to “cast” long-dead legend of the screen Toshiro Mifune as the famous warrior-poet Miyamoto Musashi, echoing his role in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy.
Its second pillar was its unique evolution of Resident Evil’s design language, combining spatial exploration and resource management with a strong melee combat system. In its simplest form, Onimusha asked the question, “How can we build the experience of Knife-Only Runs into their own holistic game?” The result was still a game about routing, herding and spacing, but one that inverted the way that Resident Evil’s resource management and combat were linked. Here, instead of collecting ammunition that could be spent to dispatch enemies, attacking was free, but enemies dropped souls used for upgrades and ammunition. With every enemy, a choice was presented: you could use the traditional tank controls to avoid their attacks and use your own to earn a normal amount of souls, or hold your ground and time your attack perfectly for a deadly counter that reaped a much greater reward. This mechanic, the Issen, became the central core of Onimusha’s identity. If an Onimusha game had to have one thing, it had to have the Issen.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword has the Issen. But it does not contain any of Onimusha’s other design fundamentals. Instead of a coherent interconnected space you explore throughout the game, there is an open world with side missions and collectables. Instead of deliberate, restricted movement and spacing, there is a heavy lock-on with strong magnetism and tracking on both Musashi’s attacks and those of his enemies. Instead of a focused resource system that emphasizes decision making in combat, there’s a sprawling amount of currencies feeding into several overlapping, incremental upgrade systems. This is Capcom’s answer for how to bring back Onimusha: to strip it entirely to its perceived core and to replace everything else with something that looks superficially similar, if you squint. The result is a game at war with itself, where each decision collides with every other in a series of unsatisfying compromises.
Let us focus first on where Onimusha: Way of the Sword also chooses to focus: combat. Onimusha’s original design focused on that risk/reward choice between avoiding being hit and standing your ground. Turning was restricted and movement was deliberate. Avoiding attacks meant carefully considering where you were standing, and the best strategy was to simply not be in the place where the enemy attacked in the first place. Standing your ground meant risking eating that hit, but opened up access to your Issen counter. This was an intuitive and engaging system, but it had one unignorable structural weakness: The Issen is a binary mechanic. Unlike movement, which due to variances in your inputs and enemy behavior, has near-infinite ways to be performed, ranging from embarrassi