Onimusha: Way of the Sword straps its own design to Musashi’s arm, then lets three men argue about it.
Spoilers through the first full fight with Ganryu.
The protagonist of Onimusha, Musashi, dies within the first half hour.
The tutorial of Onimusha: Way of the Sword ends with him killed. The next scene finds him floating down the river of the dead toward hell, where the Man in White wakes him and offers him a way back: an Oni Gauntlet, an artifact of monstrous power that will return him to the world of the living. Musashi turns it down.
Musashi: “Pull someone else up. I walk the path of the sword on my strength alone. I don’t need some monster’s power to—”
He doesn’t get to finish. The Man in White teleports behind him and stabs him.
Man in White: “Hey. When someone gives you a gift. You take it and say ‘thank you.’”
Then he starts fixing the Gauntlet to Musashi’s arm.
Musashi: “Stop! I said I don’t want it!”
Man in White: “Aww, don’t make that face. I think you’ll find... that we see eye to eye.”
As the camera pulled back and Musashi screamed, my thought was roughly: Good, implant some sense into this idiot. I’d known him for half an hour, and he’d already been killed. Refusing a gift from someone who had just saved him from descending into hell seemed ridiculous. Back among the living, Musashi tries to remove the Gauntlet, but it’s stuck to his arm more surely than his arm is attached to his torso.
I want to use this scene, and the hours that follow up to the first full fight with Ganryu, to introduce a concept from a larger project of mine on what differentiates video games as art and what games can make of those who play them. I call this concept ludonarrative co-incidence, and Onimusha stages an unusually sophisticated example of it.
A gift you can’t decline
Some things are true of you simply because you’re playing a video game, because you’re a player. You control a character, act through an interface, and (unless the game deliberately excludes it) get to try again after dying. Most games keep these conditions outside the story. Your character dies, the screen fades, and the game silently rewinds as if nothing happened.
A ludonarrative co-incidence is the event in which a condition like this falls together with a fact of the fiction: something true of you as a player becomes true of the character or the world. The test for co-incidence has two parts. Is it true of the player as a player, a condition of playing at all? And does the fiction make it true of the character or the world?
Respawning passes the first part in nearly every action game. Onimusha makes it pass the second. Every player is going to die and come back whether they want to or not, and the game makes exactly that Musashi’s condition. His resurrection is forced on him, and it won’t come off. It becomes an essential aspect of his being.
Takamura (a venerable swordsman with a Gauntlet of his own): “...that gauntlet is the only thing keeping you from falling into a heap of tripe...Pile of steaks. Mincemeat, even.”
This example of resurrection built into Musashi’s body is not simply story and mechanics agreeing. A sword the character swings and you swing is shared equipment, not co-incidence. In 2007, writing about BioShock, Clint Hocking coined “ludonarrative dissonance” for the opposite problem: when what a game has you do contradicts what its story says. A co-incidence goes beyond agreement. It takes your condition as a player and gives it a place in the story.
Death is the classic case. BioShock has its Vita-Chambers that resurrect your character. Dark Souls has you play as an Undead, cursed to rise again and again at bonfires scattered through the world. Onimusha has no such place of return. The location of resurrection is on Musashi’s arm, traveling with him. And Onimusha makes an additional move of its own, giving Musashi an opinion about his own resurrection. The Chosen Undead never complains about being undead. Jack never celebrates his effective immortality. Musashi, by contrast, refuses his resurrection on principle.
The Man in White is doing the developer’s job inside the fiction, granting your character the ability to resurrect. And despite Musashi’s objections, I immediately took the Man in White’s side, agreeing with the game’s design against its protagonist’s pride. In Dark Souls, undeath is a curse shared by player and character. In Onimusha it is a gift violently forced onto the character and graciously accepted (at least in my case) on his behalf by the player. After less than half an hour of playtime, I had barely come to identify as Musashi, so siding against him produced no cognitive or emotional dissonance. Even the Man in White’s parting line struck me as a sort of prophetic affirmation of my player disposition. “I think you’ll find that we see eye to eye” may have been mere prediction to Musashi, but it was already true of me.
No challenge
While the ludonarrative co-incidence at work in the intro proved positively enticing, the lack of difficulty in the combat quickly became off-putting. The standard Genma are almost universally weak. I played on Action, the harder of the two difficulties offered for a first playthrough, and the ordinary fights were trivial. Creative Bloq’s review of Onimusha agrees, complaining of “a little too much Genma busywork.” The fluidity and responsiveness of the mechanics seemed exceptional, but the ease of each encounter was deflating the experience. After two encounters that, despite being a step up from the rest, still failed to deliver the level of challenge I was looking for, I almost abandoned the playthrough entirely out of disappointment.
Then, as if on cue, Musashi cut through my disappointment with his own, voicing one of his most frequent post-combat lines: “No challenge!” My character and I, it would seem, were on the same page regarding the difficulty of this experience. As I began paying more attention to his lines (”You’re nothing!”, “Not worth my time!”, etc.), I realized he was just as bored as I was, for the same reason I was.
The ludonarrative co-incidence test sorts this case out too. My boredom matching his isn’t the co-incidence itself, because it depends on the player. Someone struggling with these fights might hear “No challenge!” as mockery. The co-incidence lies beneath the surface convergence. Every player meets a fight as a test, with death as nothing worse than a retry. Musashi talks about his fights the same way, as tests his opponents keep failing, and with the Gauntlet on his arm, death can’t stop him either. His lines also express the player’s relation to combat.
Where they occur matters too. Musashi refused the Gauntlet in a cutscene, while I watched from the audience and was free to side with someone else. These lines come from his mouth during play, right after the fight they judge, while I’m the one holding the sword. I diverged from Musashi watching him and converged with him playing him.
While this could be interpreted as lampshading, a game naming its own weakness to make it more forgivable in the eyes of its audience, I don’t think that’s what Onimusha is doing. While a lampshade asks you to excuse a flaw, Onimusha's lore and dialogue lines made the flaw part of who Musashi is, thereby changing what I wanted from the game. My desire for the fights to be finished rose to a desire for a fight worth engaging with, converging precisely with my character’s desire.
What blessed luck
Then came Ganryu, Musashi’s rival in history as in the game. As he attacks Musashi from off-screen in a cutscene, I responded, “Ooooh, this guy! Someone who knows how to fight; this is cool.”
Musashi notices that Ganryu wears a Gauntlet too. “You too, huh?”
After nearly slipping to his death, Ganryu lets loose a power-drunk, unhinged guffaw. “This thing’s made me so damn strong. I’ve been bored halfway back to death.”
“Right?!” I exclaim. “This guy gets it!”
Ganryu continues: “But look, you’ve got yourself one too! What blessed luck!”
I found myself laughing along with him. Finally! “This is great!”
Ganryu’s line explains the game’s easiness inside the fiction. The Gauntlet’s power is why the Genma are pushovers. While a Kyoto overrun by demons who turn out to be trivial is a textbook setup for ludonarrative dissonance, Onimusha makes it narrative content instead. “Halfway back to death” even jokes about both of the Gauntlet’s gifts at once: the power that fuels his euphoric, power-tripping rampage and bores him in the interim, and the resurrection that means he’s been dead before.
The difficulty spike of the Ganryu fight truly did feel like a blessing after the triviality of the Genma encounters. When I died, Ganryu greeted my return: “Right where we left off! Death can’t stop us!” Although he’s talking to Musashi in the fiction, he’s also talking to me as the player who just reloaded. I enjoyed the fight so much that I died several times on purpose to restart the fight and savor more time with a truly challenging opponent.
The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in Games: Agency as Art, calls this kind of behavior striving play: playing for the struggle rather than the win. I took it about as far as it goes, giving up the win to keep the struggle. Dying on purpose felt like me working the system. But the longer I kept at it, the more the system I was working felt like part of the fiction rather than outside it. Since the prologue I’d inferred that the Gauntlet was what kept raising Musashi. Against Ganryu I started to feel it. I was using the Gauntlet’s undeath, which Musashi resents, to get more of the challenge he wants, and “Death can’t stop us!” came true partly because I chose it.
The historical Musashi’s duel with Ganryu, on the island that still bears Ganryu’s name, was the one fight that could never be repeated. Onimusha makes their rivalry a fight you can repeat as often as you like.
What the Gauntlet carries
Onimusha’s opening hours have a shape. The Gauntlet is the game’s own design worn on Musashi’s arm: the respawn that keeps him coming back, the power that makes ordinary fights easy, and the boredom that comes with that power. Three men take three attitudes toward it. The Man in White insists on it. Musashi resents it. Ganryu revels in it.
My own attitude moved through all three. At the gift, I sided with the Man in White. After several sequences of ordinary fights, I shared Musashi’s contempt for his opponents and their lack of challenge. Against Ganryu, I laughed along with him and died deliberately to keep the fight going.
That’s what a co-incidence can do that mere agreement between play and story can’t. It gives your relation to a game’s design somewhere to live inside the fiction, and someone there to agree or argue with. Onimusha even made room for a weakness. The easiness could have been the reason I quit. Instead it became part of who Musashi is, and part of why the fight with Ganryu felt like the point.
By that fight, Musashi still doesn’t like the Gauntlet. He reacts with less hostility when the spirit inside it speaks, but he’s hardly warm toward it. But Ganryu is warm enough for both of them. When he says “Death can’t stop us!” he means the two of them. By the time I was dying to repeat the fight, I was undoubtedly part of that “us.”
Link to Substack article: https://substack.com/home/post/p-222434480
