Towards the end of my hands-off demo for Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, Capcom introduced me to a bunch of ragamuffin ninjas who moult their injured selves when struck. It looks like they’re springing out of their own dying heads, like Athena bursting from the skull of Zeus. That’s the kind of freak factor I want from an action-horror series whose last major instalment released in 2006. A bit of gentle madness to blow the dust off. A generous pinch of vicious little weasels who won’t fight fair, to lift this Edo-era yokai hunt above the ranks of action games that just want you to combo and parry ad nauseum.
Elsewhere in the demo, we encountered a living fireball that drank the souls of slain enemies as fuel for a kamikaze charge. Time it right, and you can grab the exploding hooligan before it clamps onto your face, and boot it straight into another group of foes. Neither these nor the duplicating ninjas are the absolute craziest video game enemies ever devised, in fairness – the fireball critter is straight out of Final Fantasy – but they vary the pace nicely, and I’m hoping they’re the tip of an iceberg of uglies. Oh, this door is sealed by a hellflesh conduit woven by a spider made of fingers? Oh, this boss is made of cursed paper? Yes, Capcom, this is the stuff. Keep them coming.
I’m hoping for some proper freakiness because Way Of The Sword seems quite routine in many respects, and competition in the feudal Japanese nightmare bastard ’em up genre is stiff. Sekiro aside, there’s Team Ninja’s Nioh series, which is soon to celebrate its third outing. So far, the new Onimusha plays things quieter than either Sekiro or Nioh, to the point of seeming plodding. This perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise. Onimusha began life as, essentially, Resident Evil with samurai, and while the old fixed perspectives are gone, you can still see that legacy in the relatively contained layout and pacing, and in creepier flourishes such as the ability to witness the souls of dead villagers, flowing up the temple steps at the behest of a demon king.
You can also see the legacy in the skillset of new protagonist Miyamoto Musashi, another demon-boshing samurai with Oni powers supplied by a talking gauntlet. Musashi loathes his talking Oni gauntlet, even though it lets him absorb souls and perform Splinter Cell: Conviction-style combo kills. He’d much rather defeat the yokai using his own, only-human samurai abilities, which are considerable.
Way Of The Sword gives great parry. Musashi can intercept a blow or projectile from any direction with one hand, sometimes without bothering to look, his katana shining white-hot under the impact. Deploy this surgically against bosses, and you can cancel beasts many times your size in pure defiance of the ratio of body masses. There are also canned special moves that give you a choice of wibbly bits to target, and double as a resourcing element – go for the head for extra damage, or savage the torso for more XP gain.
During our demo, though, Musashi seemed a bit lumbering. There was a whole lot of hustling yokai into corners and beating them like a carpet. I’m not sure whether this was due to the demo handler not quite finding the rhythm, or Way Of The Sword being more of a hackjob than advertised. Of course, the simple way to answer that question would have been to let us play the dang thing. Hopefully, we’ll get the opportunity over the summer, and hopefully, Capcom will have rustled up some additional imaginative monsters by then.
