‘Onimusha: Way of the Sword’ Review: Learn To Love The Challenge

Capcom’s latest entry in the long-dormant Onimusha action-horror series, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, is arguably the best game I’ve experienced in 2026 thus far. From its engaging and satisfying combat to its lovable characters filled with plenty of crude humor to balance its atmosphere of disturbing horror, players will find a trove of aspects to love in this surprisingly poignant Samurai narrative.

This review of Onimusha: Way of the Sword is based on the PS5 PRO English Dub version of the game.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword follows Miyamoto Musashi (Kenichiro Thomson), a skilled lone samurai who dedicates his life to mastering the blade. After an unfortunate first day in Kyoto Prefecture, Musashi is killed by a group of demons known as the Genma, but is brought back to life by the power of an Oni Gauntlet, allowing him to capture the souls of defeated Genma and further increase his power. Seeing the gauntlet as a burden, Musashi goes on a quest to get rid of the new armament and free Eastern Kyoto from the control of the Genma. Luckily, he finds allies in the departed Oni spirit living in his gauntlet, Shizuka (Yuriri Naka), a legendary Onimusha, Takamura (Shogo Miyakita), and his young Onimusha apprentice, Kabuki dancer Okuni (Leader Looi). Musashi learns to work with his allies to defeat the forsaken Onimusha Yoshitsune & Ganryu (Shogo Miyakita & Tashinga Bepete), whilst also finding out what true strength really means and where it comes from. 

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is immensely satisfying from a narrative and gameplay perspective. Upon booting up the game for the first time on my PS5 Pro, I was taken aback by not only how gorgeous the game looks and sounds, but also how it plays. Many have seen clips of gameplay online and written this off as a copycat of FromSoftware’s Soulslike games; however, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Onimusha: Way of the Sword has increasingly difficult combat throughout the story; it eases you into its mechanics before later asking you to choose a path and master it, as for most of the gameplay you will be fighting Genma grunts or in some jaw-dropping boss fight. There are three main mechanics to tackle the combat encounters in this game: first, you can parry enemy attacks will a simple press of the L1 button right before the enemy’s attack connects with you, staggering your opponent. Secondly, you can perform a reflex dodge if you’d like to be a bit riskier in your encounters: what the reflex dodge will do is cause Musashi to dodge the attack as soon as it is about to connect and then quickly get a few hits in of his own. Finally, there’s Issen, which is the most satisfying to pull off in my opinion. Issen is when the player performs a counter attack right as their opponent’s attack is about to connect, only for Musashi to perform a sidestep and unleash a critical hit on his enemy, killing grunts in one hit and doing massive damage to bosses. 

However, the combat doesn’t end there, as you can get into blade locks with your enemies causing players to perform a quick time event to break their opponent’s guard and you can clash your sword with your opponent as you each do the same attack input, only being broken by choosing a different attack and then striking. The combat remained to be ridiculously fun and satisfying for the entire 27 hours it took me to complete the main story and a good amount of side content due to the smooth motion capture animations and increasingly challenging opponents the game would throw at you. 

The English voice cast did an amazing job bringing these characters to life, especially Kenichiro Thomson & Tashinga Bepete, whose rivalry as Musashi and Ganryu had me grinning from ear to ear whenever they confronted one another. A choice that could’ve utterly failed was Capcom basing Musashi’s likeness on Toshiro Mifune, however after completing the game he feels perfectly in line for a protagonist the legendary actor would’ve portrayed. Paired with a story with immensely poignant themes about suffering, true strength, and finding where you belong, this is my favorite game I’ve played thus far in 2026 (slightly beating Resident Evil: requiem). 

However, this is by no means a perfect game, as the side content is nowhere near as strong as the main story missions, repeating the same “close this rift” objectives whilst also repeating certain mini-bosses to nauseating degree. Unfortunately the Eastern Kyoto hub-area also feels tacked on as do the side missions to pad runtime so the developers didn’t have to worry about the nonsensical discourse that surrounds sub 20 hour full-priced video games these days, the character progression system is also lacking, as each upgrade you do for Musashi will increase either his armor, sword, or gauntlet by 2% each upgrade. Now these may seem like huge criticisms however in the grand scheme of the whole experience you can pretty much forego all side content and still get an amazing experience out of this game with all of the same progression you would’ve gotten in the main story. 

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is yet another win for Capcom in 2026, as they seem to have no plans in slowing down their revival of dormant IPs, I just hope they’re able to make a modern Dino Crisis game on the level of this. If you’re a fan of action-horror video games, Resident Evil, or Samurai, you won’t want to miss this absolutely amazing game. 

Onimusha: Way of the Sword was developed and published by Capcom, the English Dub stars Kenichiro Thomson, Yuriri Naka, Shogo Miyakita, Leader Looi, and Tashinga Bepete. The game was released on September 4th for PS5, Xbox Series X & S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

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