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Onimusha: Way of the Sword has received universal praise for its combat animations, which somehow manage to look natural and fluid no matter what angle or direction hero Miyamoto Musashi has to swing his sword to parry an incoming blow. In a post-launch interview, I asked Capcom how—beyond doing a ton of work across Onimusha’s lengthy development—they managed to raise the bar for this sort of action game.
“Starting the project six years ago, we felt it was important to have that detail to sell the power and the excitement of the action, so it’s something we really focused on,” said director Satoru Nihei.
“Even at that starting point, we knew it was something that Capcom, as a company, have as a great strength: We have a lot of assets and tech available to us that allow us to create these varieties of actions. That’s something we really felt we could leverage to make the game really stand out that a lot of other places can’t really copy. On top of producing a lot of animations and motion capture, we have to give a lot of credit to the programmers for taking that data and putting it in a form that we can have them make these very smooth transitions, with these physics-based calculations, to go from one animation to another. It was a big team effort in getting the animations to look how they do.”
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PC Gamer actually got a behind-the-scenes look at that process when we traveled to Osaka this summer to see Onimusha: Way of the Sword wrapping up development.
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The effort put into Onimusha’s animations is even more impressive within the scope of the final game and its roster of intricately choreographed boss fights. Despite being the third of Capcom’s three big releases this year, following Resident Evil: Requiem and Pragmata, Onimusha features some fancy samurai dismemberment tech new to the publisher’s in-house game engine. Rather than factoring into the more scripted boss fights, it comes into play when Musashi chops weaker enemies into pieces with dramatic finishers like the lightning fast Issen strike.
“One particular piece of technology that was added specifically for this title that we couldn’t have done before is what we call the dynamic dismemberment system,” Nihei said. “If you slash enemies with certain attacks they get cut in the exact path that a sword passes through. While that’s something that has been done in the past in other games, one of the challenges and things we built on that was brand new with Onimusha was having that happen along with enemies still being animated as they’re dying and dropping.
“In lots of other games you’d cut them, they’d kind of freeze when you do the cut and then fall apart. We had to have the programmers add to RE Engine to be able to enable that to really sell the impact of moves like the Issen. That was something brand new added to the engine.”
This isn’t the first time Nihei has talked about Onimusha’s dismemberment system, but I followed up by contrasting it with other action games like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which go a bit more freeform with their chopping. Nihei said that the Onimusha team knew they didn’t want to go that route even early in development.
“In other games where you have that ability to cut up anything—just because of the tempo and style of game we wanted to make, it wasn’t something we considered for Onimusha. Choosing exactly which direction and how you want to cut, we didn’t think it was a good match for this particular title. Rather, we wanted to have something that happened reactively to how you’re playing, to show off the power of the abilities.”
Now that Onimusha’s dynamic dismemberments are bedded into RE Engine, I hope they’ll show up in Capcom’s future games. Surely next time Leon blows a zombie in half with a shotgun its guts will be slipping and sliding all over the place.
