Twenty years is a long time to leave a sword gathering dust. Yet Onimusha: Way of the Sword does not feel like Capcom dragged an old name out of storage because somebody found money hiding underneath it. This is a beautiful, bloody and remarkably confident return built around one irresistible truth: putting a sword in Musashi’s hand makes almost everything else fade into the background.
Launching on 4 September 2026, the new Onimusha is a roughly 20-hour action game rather than another continent-sized checklist. Capcom supplied POPTOPIC with pre-release PC access for this review. Its opening is restrictive, parts of Kyoto are oddly confusing, and the writing occasionally seems too conscious of explaining Japan to the West. Then a grotesque Genma crawls into another breathtaking vista, Musashi draws steel, and those complaints suddenly become much smaller.
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The RE Engine Has Never Looked Better
Onimusha: Way of the Sword is stunning. Running at maximum settings with HDR10+, its ancient temples, mist-covered mountains and forests cut through by shafts of sunlight repeatedly invite you to stop and stare. At its best, it does not look rendered so much as painted.
The RE Engine has already proved itself across Resident Evil, Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Monster Hunter: Wilds, but this may be its richest showcase. Musashi moves with weight, attacks flow cleanly into parries and executions, and the environments balance historical texture with supernatural rot.
There is an obvious gap between the stars and the supporting cast. Musashi and Shizuka receive extraordinary facial detail and animation; put an ordinary citizen beside them and the difference in budget becomes impossible to ignore. The lesser NPCs are not ugly. They simply look unfinished by comparison.
The Genma suffer no such neglect. Capcom’s artists appear to have been locked in a room with Lovecraft, a stack of Junji Ito manga and instructions to make every creature more disturbing than the last. Onimusha gives you postcard Japan, then drops something from a fever dream into the middle of it. The contrast is magnificent.
Sound You Can Almost Feel
The sound design may be even better than the visuals. Wind slips through quiet spaces, footsteps change across surfaces and two swords meeting sounds less like an effect than a small industrial accident. Parries crack through the mix; executions land with ugly finality.
The Japanese-inspired score moves effortlessly from restrained exploration to enormous cinematic combat without swallowing dialogue. Voice performances embrace the heightened energy of prestige anime, but the cast rarely sounds as if it is competing to be the loudest person in the booth.
A Magical Companion Who Knows When to Push Back
Yes, Musashi has a magical companion attached to him for much of the journey. Anybody who survived Cuff’s endless chatter in Forspoken may already be reaching for the dialogue-volume slider. Thankfully, Shizuka is more than a dispenser for quips and exposition.
She understands the Genma and the mythology Musashi has stumbled into, giving the player context without turning every scene into a lecture. More importantly, Musashi does not immediately adore her. They irritate each other, argue and push back. Their chemistry comes from clashing personalities rather than a writer repeatedly insisting that banter is happening now.
The difference between charming dialogue and exhausting dialogue is whether you believe these people would still speak when the player is not listening. Musashi and Shizuka pass that test.
Where Is All the Japan?
My largest reservation is tied to one of the game’s greatest strengths. Onimusha: Way of the Sword is unmistakably Japanese: its architecture, demons, historical personalities, music and imagery are drenched in the country’s culture. That makes it frustrating whenever the writing appears to smooth those edges for an international audience.
Accessibility is not the problem. The assumption that Western players still need every cultural corner rounded off is. Audiences have embraced games such as Stellar Blade and Death Stranding 2 partly because they do not feel focus-tested into familiar Western shapes.
I wanted this revival to dig even deeper into Eastern history, folklore, politics and storytelling conventions, then trust players to follow. Fortunately, the compromise is an irritating flavour rather than something that poisons the meal. Whenever Onimusha embraces its identity without apology, it is glorious.
Easy to Learn, Bloody Difficult to Master
Combat is the reason to play. The fundamentals—attack, dodge, block and parry—are immediately readable, and weaker Genma can briefly make Musashi look considerably more talented than the person holding the controller. That early confidence is a trap.
As the enemy roster expands, aggression alone stops working. You learn the parry window, judge when to deflect rather than evade, read posture and fold Issen attacks into your rhythm. At first I was surviving fights. Before long, I was conducting them.
A perfect encounter becomes musical: strike, strike, deflect, turn, counter, execution. When everything aligns, the inputs disappear and instinct takes over. The feeling is fantastic, especially because the combat systems distinguish defence rather than treating every counter as the same colour-coded button prompt.
The progression surrounding that swordplay is more substantial than it first appears. Musashi’s sword, clothing and Oni Gauntlet improve independently, while skills, charms, blessings and Oni Armaments broaden the answers available in a fight. Best of all, the upgrades are palpable. This is not a parade of two-percent bonuses hiding in a spreadsheet and expecting emotional investment.
New counters change encounters. Greater survivability buys room for risk. Oni abilities solve problems the katana cannot. The numbers exist, but the real reward is watching Musashi transform from a reckless swordsman into the most frightening thing in the room.
The Bosses Keep Changing the Rules
The bosses are where Capcom flexes. Their strength is not merely inflated health; each one changes what the player is being asked to understand.
Daidara can consume the souls scattered around the arena, forcing a choice between maintaining pressure and pulling resources towards the Oni Gauntlet before the monster feeds. Sasaki Ganryu strips away much of the spectacle and gives Musashi something more dangerous: another exceptional swordsman. The Greater Nue adds beast-like movement and lightning, disrupting the comfortable rhythm built in earlier encounters.
The best bosses make you reconsider what you thought you had mastered, and Onimusha understands that. Death usually produces the useful frustration of recognising a mistimed response rather than the suspicion that the game cheated. Eventually an impossible opponent starts moving slowly—not because it changed, but because you did.
Linear Until Kyoto Opens Its Gates
The opening is aggressively linear. Move from one point to another, collect an item, cut through a group of Genma, continue. Stranger still, some stages become confusing despite offering very few real directions. More than once the obvious question is: how am I lost when there are practically only two ways to go?
Kyoto eventually creates breathing room. Corruption clears, new areas become accessible and the hub supports exploration, side activities and upgrade hunting between more deliberately designed story missions. The main campaign takes roughly 20 hours, which suits a focused action game that values replayable combat over acreage.
Not every game needs a continent covered in 4,000 question marks. Onimusha does not need an open world; it needs enough world to let the journey breathe.
The side quests understand another increasingly forgotten rule: leave before you become boring. Help somebody, investigate something, kill something horrible, collect the reward. Done. Their objectives are rarely revolutionary, but their brevity turns “one more” into three more before you notice.
A Hell of a Comeback
Onimusha: Way of the Sword is not perfect. The opening holds the player’s hand too tightly, navigation occasionally fights the structure, minor NPCs expose the limits of its lavish presentation, and its Japanese identity sometimes feels unnecessarily filtered for Western comfort.
Those frustrations surround dangerously addictive combat, exceptional audiovisual craft, memorable monsters and bosses that repeatedly prove why Capcom remains one of the industry’s finest action-game developers. The RE Engine provides the canvas. Japanese mythology supplies the nightmare. Capcom hands Musashi the sword.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword did not return to remind us what the series used to be; it came back swinging, and Capcom’s blade is still frighteningly sharp.
A gorgeous and gloriously physical return whose superb swordplay and monstrous bosses cut through uneven navigation and a surprisingly cautious treatment of its Japanese identity.
