// PC GAMER — GAMING
Sick of grinding for upgrade materials like leather and iron in Onimusha: Way of the Sword? Good news: you can buy a lot of them
With the souls you get from killing Genma, not cash money.
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Onimusha: Way of the Sword is the latest victim of the dreaded AAA videogame disease: Padded Runtime Via Unsatisfying Upgrade Materials. It could be a lot worse: thankfully there's no level gating in Onimusha that requires you to accrue an arbitrary set of stats before you can tackle a particular quest. It's not an RPG, and I'm sure as soon as Twitch streamers get their hands on it they'll be flexing on the hardest bosses without ever upgrading their gear by a single percentage point.
But for us mortals, Onimusha's runtime is padded out by a pretty boring hub world full of pretty boring upgrade materials like cotton and iron that you use to very, very slowly increase your damage, health, stamina, and Oni power gauge. It's a dull system that doesn't evolve a single bit over the entire game. There are also rarer upgrade materials that you use to unlock abilities and enhancements on the skill tree.
This structure encourages you to spend quite a few hours playing the least fun bits of Onimusha, but I do have some good news: there's a way to bypass some of the tedium that you can easily overlook.
A few hours into Onimusha: Way of the Sword, you'll complete a quest to purify Yasui Konpiragu shrine, saving its guardian Oni spirit from an evil Genma infestation. Once done, Yorimasa will begin selling you items for red souls, the standard "currency" you accrue from killing enemies. If you're anything like me, you'll take a cursory look at what's for sale, go "I don't need any of this stuff right now" and then go play about 10 more hours of Onimusha without bothering to revisit the shrine.
Don't do that! Check back in after you complete every major story mission, because Yorimasa's Monument expands the shop inventory several times throughout the game. And after awhile he'll begin stocking some of the key crafting items, including:
Yorimasa doesn't sell all these right at the start, but early on you'll probably be getting the basics like cotton cloth and regular iron at a pretty steady clip, and won't need as many of these rarer materials. There are five upgrade tiers for your clothing, sword, and gauntlet, though, each of which require a substantial number of materials to work your way through. Unless you spend hours and hours doing sidequests in Kyoto and chasing down every shiny chest your Oni vision highlights for you, you're going to need more of these items than you accrue naturally throughout the game. (Even putting around 35 hours into Onimusha I didn't quite max out any of my gear.)
By the mid- and late-game, at least, you can supplement your findings with some stock bought from Yorimasa's finite supply. If you have the red souls, I recommend buying as many as you can; hunting for them really drags down Onimusha's pacing.
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