Onimusha : Way of the Sword impressions

 Played more Onimusha over the weekend. As one who has completed Sekiro, I can definitely see the influence of that game. It feels like the Capcom staff played that game and thought, "We can do better!".


With Capcom's knowhow on button timings and just that frame-by-frame precision they have on fighting games, you can definitely 'feel' it in Onimusha. It seems to me you have a cancel window before you parry, exactly like in Street Fighter, so if you commit to hitting the one handed strike but see your opponent is going for an armored move or something that is 'unblockable', you can still parry it within a window of time. It sounds scary and seems like something that is not casual friendly --- but every player should try it, it's really exhilirating and the reward of just watching Musashi do that parry animation (and the SCREECH- sound that a sword parry makes) --- is incredibly satisifying. Each parry even differs depending on what your opponent did. Which makes this game really unique from Sekiro as Capcom took the trouble to put in really complicated looking motion captures of parries -- they happen so smoothly and it is really satisfying to see them happen. Think of QTE's in other games except in this game, there's no prompts (other than you seeing the strike coming)--- they do make sure to make it very visible to you when a specific attack is coming.

It is really surprising how well it works. I'm reminded of the Virtua Fighter Crossroads tech-demo where you had the martial artists sparring and they were blocking each others hits like a kung fu movie. Parrying here is kind of like that. It feels like you have a split second to catch the opponent's sword, but the controls are so good that you will be able to catch them probably 90% of the time if you're paying attention.

That makes it less strict than Sekiro IMHO. While they made parrying relatively easier, they made the fights feel much longer so you would be fighting a boss for probably 5-10 minutes, just gracefully dancing with parries and hits--- it's a thing of beauty!

The game is definitely getting more difficult as you go forward. But they did include the ability to just change the difficulty anytime -- so if you just want to wrap up the story, just change the difficulty to 'Story' and it should be a lot less Soulslike.

Overall, I think Capcom probably saw all the Souls games and thought, we can do better than that --- and they went ahead and did it, leveraging their decades of fighting game experience with their quality animation and gameplay knowledge to make what looks like a legendary game.

The Game Awards will probably be a Capcom vs Capcom vs Capcom fight for GOTY, with Requiem, Pragmata and Onimusha all worthy nominees for 2026!

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