Im not saying the voice acting was badly performed (the voice actor is Japanese and speaks English fluently), rather the fact that it was completely jarring and distracting when playing the game to the extent that I switched to Japanese with subs fairly quickly after meeting Takamura because it just didn't mesh or feel right to hear a modernish English accent when playing the game.

It might just be me.

I heard nightmare stories about how hard Carnage difficulty is, though I honestly breezed through most of it about as much as I did Combat difficulty.

I say most, because of course there’s Yoshitsune. He was an absolute bastard to beat on Action difficulty, so of course he was also an absolute bastard to beat on Carnage difficulty.

But hey, I pulled through and unlocked a sweet ass sword and some drip as a result.

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

I was thinking about if people think the game is too easy why not treat it like a souls run people do level 1 runs all the time so I decided to make a completely new file on carnage mode and forgot to save my previous file in carnage mode so now I have to run through ganryu and daidara and a couple other things again. But at least I did make the brand new carnage mode file I want to run through without using any heals, no Oni transformation no Oni armaments during fights just straight up combat mechanics. Of course if it's mandatory then it's fine but if it's not mandatory then I will avoid using it.

Update : thanks guys, I'll go watch a lets play then :)

So, I love soulslike or fighting games, but I have one specific petpeeve.

I hate games that makes you parry no matter what.

For example, Sekiro. You can't finish the game without parrying.

But a game like Dark Souls, you can play it all without touching that mecanic.

Is this game requiring you to parry if you do not want to have a miserable time ?

So i just platinumed the game, and aftersome reading and watching some videos online, i just realized the deflect is superior to parry.

So I only played sekiro prior.. and in my mind they got mixed up, tought the "easy" way is to hold L1 and press X on attacks which would be a deflect ,while the "harder and better" option is parry...

Im writing this as im now thinking back and realizing why the final boss attempts time were so long each time😭🤣

Soo, how harder is the game without ever deflecting? Or am I overthinking?😅

I can't believe I'm saying this, because until now I thought FromSoftware had perfected it. But Capcom has created something so beautiful and fluid that it outshines even the GOAT of sword fighting.

Hi all - I just picked up the demo after finishing Khazan (amazing game). Weird experience though. Coast through all the enemies like a katana through cheese sticks, then hit a boss and the combat changed? All the grunts taught me that you can block and then tap a button just before getting hit to do a lot of stamina damage, but then I get to the boss and block is no longer a thing? It doesn’t really explain it. I switched to dodging or tapping block just as I’m about to get hit and that seems to work instead.

So am I stupid? Do combat techniques change for bosses? I might be a little burnt out on action games after mortal shell 2 and Kazan, as the demo is kind of so-so for me. I’m assuming the actual game is much better though.

Cheers

Haven't played the game much, been on the ghost of yotei dlc. But when I beat the all 3 of my playthroughs I only ever used the hammers and the daggers. I used the hammers on action and on carnage I used the daggers on bosses a lot because they heal you, it was a strategy on carnage to preserve my healing potions. Never even touched the other armaments. I used the flame flute to only to get the trophy to set 3 enemies ablaze at once for the platinum.

Finished the game for a while ago but can't rest my mind on why Takamura didn't kill off Ganryu so he couldn't get to hell and let Yoshitsune have all the souls. I get it that maybe he was too emotional about Okuni at that time but it still feels too reckless for an Onimusha that had lived for 700 years. Same goes with Musashi, he just let Ganryu go just after all that.

Is it just me (I do think I suck lol), or does the animation for items beyond the pouch take too long? I feel like it is never worth it to use all these things. Either that or I am just not utilizing them correctly in fights.

I am guess I am supposed to pop them when the bosses usually circle? Maybe I am just feeling like they go away too fast when I should play smart.

Thoroughly enjoyed the new Onimusha, and am eager to see what’s next for Musashi and Okuni! And I still have to do a NG+ play through 😬

Capcom released their FY26 Q2 Financial Results today and they crushed

A few highlights below 👇

1) Highest-ever total unit sales for 1st half of year, which for Capcom runs from April to September

2) Physical unit sales are up 95% YoY

⚠️Very likely the communities response to Sony's announcement to permanently discontinue physical disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles starting in January 2028.⚠️

3) Onimusha: Way of the Sword unit sales surpassed 1.7 million units

Personally excited by this. I bought the title three times. All for the PS5. They were

* The International Steel book

* A Digital copy

and

* The Japanese Art & Music Collection Premium Deluxe Edition for the PS5

Hyperlink below to CAPCOM's Investor Relations webpage where you can review the report for yourself

https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/data/result.html

And a few screenshots attached above for your convenience

Happy gaming friends

And Long Live Physical

Good morning, my friends. Sharing with you my fight against YoShitsune on Normal difficulty, with no damage taken :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEVvrEBLuX0&t=217s

How to fix this?I have been turned off ray tracing and shadow quality to low.

>!Yoshitsune might have been the hardest fight over ever had, I think I struggled with him more than anything in dark souls or Elden ring. The only real move I thought was bullshit was his grab attack, that was making me pull my hair out before I figured it out.

But phase 2 actually made me out the game down for a day and come back it, lol. I feel quite drained after winning. Probably going to give it a couple days or so before I start carnage!<

Bare the rant, these are just tips of the iceberg

This might just be a personal thing but to me this game isn’t onimusha. I understand that it’s more of a reimagining of the original games but so much of what made the original games what they are has been lost.

To me, the story isn’t as impactful as the original series, the original is history mixed with fiction, this one seems to have created its own full blown story line, however with no back story to the events of the game it makes the story very easily dismissible, I found myself skipping most of the cut scenes just to play the game because the story never grabbed me from the start. In the first game we had a cutscene and pictures telling us who the Genma were, why they were attacking and what they’ve already accomplished.

MUSASHI? Why on earth are we fighting with one sword? He was litterally the founder of Hyoho Niten Ichi Ryu (fighting with two swords at once) and the only thing we see of this is the special attack.

Speaking of the ‘magic’ weapons we get, the whole thing in the original series was each weapon had different magic but along with that, different speeds and damage, the hammer in onimusha 2 could floor brutes so they could be stabbed however it took longer to swing the hammer than the wind one which moves very fast with less damage. Sharing magic between every weapon and having so many new ones in a ‘first’ game makes it so overwhelming they become pointless, ones always inevitabley the strongest and the rest of them become obsolete.

Souls? I don’t like how you can move and suck souls at the same time, as a kid and even still to this day the amount of frustration and deaths I’ve had on the originals because Im low on health, go to suck a health orb and get struck is RIDICULOUS, but it’s what makes the game fun and addictive

The bosses… these were fun however become very predictable very quickly, once you’ve fought them you can learn what’s coming and block, attack and issen awfully easily against them. Go back to the original series and look at a few, Bee lady in onimusha 1, jujudormah in onimusha 2, Ranmaru in onimusha 3, 4 bosses back to back in onimusha 6 back to back boss battles to end the game. These are just a few but they are so much harder than ANY of the bosses in the new game

All in all I think they used the name onimusha to make a fan base for a game they’ve created, they’ve added the gauntlet and genma from the original and that’s about it. This game could have had a completely different name, same mechanics and been an ‘onimusha’ like game instead, however if they marketed it like that it wouldn’t get as many sales as the ‘onimusha’ name does because we live in a world where everyone’s desperate for nostalgia but this game is definatly not an onimusha game, another example of using nostalgia to ruin a game series.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the game all in all but I would have been much happier if they didn’t say it was onimusha cause that got me more excited for what was to come, this is just another game.

Quick note, I think they could have made it better if it was set in the same onimusha universe but in the future, the genma have reammerged after being defeated by soki and Mushashi is the chosen person to stop them, then have cutscenes in the oni world where he comes across people like samanuske, Jubei and soki and is tought different lessons on learning different ways of the oni and how to defeat them, just a quick take but think it would have made a much better nostalgic experience

I never thought I'd be doing a challenge like this in a game. I don't usually play games with long boss fights (the closest I've done was GoW, and that's very far from this game lol). I initially just bought this because it was Onimusha, and I remember as a kid watching my dad play the old ones on the PS2 (and ofc I also got my hands on them;I still remember fighting that Daidara-looking enemy in a cave).

Then I got really addicted to the almost frame-perfect inputs (issen). It had the same feeling as landing a successful EWGF as Kazuya in Tekken. That gave me the idea that maybe Carnage is doable without any upgrades, and after some time and off-stream practice, we got it done!

I just thought I'd share this here because it was a cool accomplishment for someone who usually just plays ranked FPS/BR games, and now we've conquered quite a hard challenge in a totally different genre! The whole game (even my first playthrough) was streamed over on YT/Tw/TikTok. Just a nice feeling overall!

Thanks for reading :D

So I’m having a huge issue. The audio is so delayed with the characters movements. For example, I will swing the sword, and the sound of doing so won’t occur until almost a full second later. Anyone have any advice how to fix this because as it stands right now, this is totally
Unplayable. Any help would be appreciated