Onimusha: Way of the Sword Is the Best Sword Duel Capcom Has Built in Twenty Years, When It Stops Wandering

Combat is the reason to be here, and it is close to exceptional. The core exchange is built on reading an attack and answering it precisely: block to weather pressure, deflect to open a window, and land an Issen, a perfectly timed killing counter, when the timing is exact. Enemies telegraph, but they telegraph fast, and the game rewards patience under pressure rather than button-mashing aggression. Waiting for the right beat to strike, and having the nerve to hold your guard when everything says to swing, is the whole discipline, and it is deeply satisfying once it clicks.

The Oni Gauntlet is the system that keeps this from being a straight Sekiro tribute. Absorbing souls from slain Genma feeds your abilities and powers, and it gives the fights a predatory pull: you are not only surviving encounters, you are harvesting them. Layered on top are different stances and weapons that shift range and rhythm, so a room of enemies asks you to change your approach rather than repeat one loop, and the skill ceiling stays high without ever feeling arbitrary.

Crucially, the game is generous where Souls-likes are cruel. There is no harsh death penalty draining your progress, and the default challenge sits below the punishing bar set by Sekiro or Elden Ring, which makes the deflection language approachable without gutting it. That said, the game is clearly built to be played with the difficulty pushed up. Turn the challenge higher and each encounter transforms, mastering the blade means every fight feels distinct, and the combat sings loudest when it demands the most from you.

The boss battles are the peak. They are staged like set pieces from an action film, dynamic and theatrical, and several of them rank among the most thrilling duels the genre has produced. They test the exact skills the regular combat teaches, so victory feels like the payoff of a lesson rather than a spike of luck, and the game's best hours are almost all boss hours.

The trouble is everything between those hours. Way of the Sword folds in exploration and open-world texture that the combat never asked for, and much of it reads as filler: stretches of traversal and busywork that dilute the momentum the duels build. Pacing stumbles noticeably in the second half, where the game seems less sure of how to space out its highs. On PC there are also launch-window rough spots worth flagging, including reports that uncapping the frame rate can trigger a crash at startup and a localization that some players found weak, though the underlying performance is otherwise strong.

Taken together, this is a superb action game wearing a merely decent adventure game as a coat. The loop of fight, learn, and overcome is world-class. The connective tissue around it, the wandering and the padding, is the part that keeps Way of the Sword one clean edit away from greatness.

Kyoto under the Genma is a genuinely evocative setting, and Capcom leans into the grit rather than the postcard. The world is blood-soaked and heavy, all dark wood, lantern light, and the wet sheen of a fight gone long, and the art direction sells the weight of every strike. This is not a pretty samurai fantasy; it is a grim one, and the visual identity commits to that mood with real conviction.

The craft is loudest in the animation and the staging of combat. Deflections land with a physical crack, Issen counters resolve in a single decisive motion, and the bosses are choreographed like fight scenes, with camera and timing working together to make each duel feel authored rather than generated. That theatricality is the game's aesthetic thesis: violence as performance, each encounter framed to look as good as it feels.

Sound does a lot of the heavy lifting too. The clash of steel, the hiss of a parry, and the low dread of a Genma encounter give the fights their tension, and the audio cues double as combat information, telling you when a window is open. Where the presentation wobbles is outside the arena, in the quieter exploration stretches that never look as considered as the duels, a reminder that this is a game whose heart was always in the fight.