Onimusha: Way of the Sword Review: Capcom’s Samurai Epic Overstays Its Welcome Late in Onimusha: Way of the Sword, when I was growing weary from facing down the same few demonic bosses in demanding duels, I found some much-needed wisdom in a stone slate. “When going through hell, one must keep going,” it told me. It’s the advice I needed to hear 20 hours into Capcom’s new samurai action game, because Way of the Sword can feel like hell in its hardest moments. The franchise revival does away with the Resident Evil-like exploration of its PS2-era games in favor of a typical modern boss gauntlet filled with parries. Even when your power is rising through piecemeal RPG progression, it always feels like you’re in the duel of your life. And as old foes you swear you vanquished already rear their ugly heads again, you have no choice but to give up or stand and fight. I chose to keep going until the end, but Way of the Sword struggled to earn my patience in a promising action game bogged down by needless repetition. Sometimes, it’s a battle worth surviving. Powerful swordplay moves in lockstep with thematic takeaways about the nature of strength, making for the rare hard game that actually has something to say about its own difficulty. But by the end of my quest, I couldn’t say that I felt enriched from all that suffering. Way of the Sword is more or less a total reboot for the Onimusha series, which debuted in 2001 and largely wrapped up in 2006 after four mainline games. The originals were tight horror-action games with fixed camera angles and puzzles — Resident Evil’s samurai cousins. Way of the Sword does away with that in favor of a more modern action RPG, one that contains shades of Dark Souls, Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi games, and the Yakuza series.#capcom #miyamoto_musashi #onimusha_way_of_the_sword #toshiro_mifune #kenichiro_thomson
