It's been 19 years since Capcom released another game progressing the story of its samurai action horror franchise, Onimusha -- but in 2026, Onimusha: Way of the Sword will arrive as the next game in the series. Ahead of Gamescom, Capcom gave US media a preview of the game with a short 15-minute demo, a mere taste to show us where the next game is going in the two decades since the last mainline Onimusha.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword continues the franchise's tradition of basing characters on historic figures and then having them fight demons. Players take on the role of Miyamoto Musashi -- one of the most famous swordsmen in Japanese history -- tasked with destroying the Genma, an army of demons plaguing the land. You'll hack, you'll slash, you'll parry, you'll kick ass.
The Onimusha games have always been something of an arcade hack-and-slash with parrying mechanics, a novelty when the series debuted in the early 2000s, but which other games have adopted in the decades since. Period samurai games have been in vogue in recent years, from 2019's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice to 2020's Ghost of Tsushima (and Ghost of Yotei releasing soon) to this year's Assassin's Creed: Shadows.
Capcom
While my demo with Onimusha: Way of the Sword was brief, it seems like Capcom has resisted mimicking the stealth and hyper-mobility of those more modern samurai games and preserved the idiosyncrasies of the originals. Musashi receives the power of the Oni gauntlet, through which he can absorb orbs of the hordes of demons he slays -- and no, you still can't jump.
Most of the modernizations to Onimusha: Way of the Sword is through the parry system, which has four different ways to deflect enemy attacks, presuming you time it correctly. Yet it's still a game about cutting apart demons with your sword in frankly brutal fashion, depleting their block meter to get in a final slash that will frequently slice them in half in a gruesomely satisfying fashion.
Capcom
A short slice of Onimusha: Way of the Sword
The demo opened up with the player as Musashi walking down a forest path to get to a temple, passing fleeing villagers and sword-wielding demon soldiers pursuing them. Killing them was easy -- the game was on the Action difficulty (with an even easier Story difficulty if I wanted), and even with my middling Sekiro and Elden Ring skills, it was a breeze, so I'm hoping for a tougher option when the game releases.
A dark fog gathered around the temple, which Musashi called Malice, which sounds like a concentration of demonic presence (but what do I know). As I approach the temple gates, the Oni gauntlet, the soul-gathering demon armor piece that's iconic to the franchise, speaks to Musashi. When he moves to touch a glowing orb, ghostly memories of villagers march into the temple. To enter myself, I had to use Oni Vision -- basically a Batman-style detective sight -- to find the right spiritual binding to cut.
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