Onimusha: Way of the Sword Preview Teases More Capcom 2026 Domination

The samurai action revival has a lot of new tricks up its sleeve

We’ve learned a whole lot about Onimusha: Way of the Sword since its reveal at the 2024 Game Awards. There have been multiple trailers teasing its story, and we’ve tried our hands at its thrilling combat in two separate demos. Even with all of that, I still have a lot of questions about Capcom’s Onimusha revival ahead of its Sept. 4 launch on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.

After going hands-on with it once more, this time in a substantial two-hour demo, I have a much better sense of what Capcom is going for with Way of the Sword — and it's nothing like the original games. The heated boss duels are still the star of the show, but open-ended missions and a heavy emphasis on skill tree progression tease an entirely new start for the 25-year-old samurai series.

We’ve known for a while that Way of the Sword wouldn’t be anything like its PS2 predecessors. The series’ first games were riffs on the early Resident Evil formula, complete with fixed camera angles. Way of the Sword retains the same pseudo-horror, but switches the action into a more modern third-person hack-and-slash format. But for the first leg of my demo, it felt like it was hanging onto some throwback energy.

I started in a linear level that had me chasing a Genma named Daidara through a surreal maze of rocks and decayed buildings. Occasionally, I’d step into an area filled with enemies that I had to take out, getting me acquainted with Way of the Sword’s combat. No surprises there: slash, block, break enemy guards, and perform brutal finishers. The one twist is that I got to play with some dastardly environmental hazards. I used my bow to shoot a rock floating above some enemies, and crushed the hell out of them.

This segment was refreshingly straightforward. I looted carefully placed treasure chests scattered around the level. I did the lightest bit of puzzle-solving, as I had to move a platform by finding an angle where I could shoot an eye hidden on it. It all culminated in a tough, but fair two-phase boss fight against the hulking Daidara that tested my mastery of the full combat system. Be warned: this isn’t the kind of game you’ll be able to get through without learning how to block.

Just as I thought I had a handle on the structure, Way of the Sword threw a curveball. Now, I was in a small village and tasked with closing some demonic rifts scattered throughout it. I could tackle those in any order I wanted, and there was plenty of free space between them to look for treasure, fight clusters of enemies, and even save villagers to earn rewards that I could use to upgrade my gear. It wasn’t an open-world in scope — think a more compact version of Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake’s village — but I could spend plenty of time grinding for souls if I wanted to.

It’s very different for Onimusha, but it’s still fairly limited in scope. At one point, I found a group of demons trying to break down a door as a woman screamed behind it. I fought them off, and the woman thanked me by giving me an item I could use as an offering at shrines to upgrade my charms. Later, I walked through that area again to find the exact same thing happening, breaking the illusion that the village is home to emergent story moments. The open areas switch up the flow and give you some agency as you run between objective markers, but I don’t imagine players will want to spend hours at a time triggering the same enemy encounters.

There is a good reason to, though. As the play area opened up, so did Way of the Sword’s RPG progression systems. There are tons of resources scattered around that can be used to pump up your base stats, improve charms, and unlock new moves. That last part is noteworthy, as Way of the Sword features a sizable skill tree on par with God of War. I was only able to unlock a few nodes during my demo, but that included a more powerful parry and the ability to chain kill an extra enemy after a finisher. Considering how many locked nodes there were, it looks like Capcom is going all in to keep the hack-and-slash combat exciting.

I look forward to seeing where it goes, because the moment-to-moment battles I played weren’t particularly remarkable. Some enemy variants, like speedy bugs and floating heads, changed the pace and range I had to fight at, but I was mostly pulling off the same button combination against standard enemies. Slash, slash, slash, hit a few heavy strikes to break an enemy’s block, hit a two-button finisher, repeat. That only started to change near the end of my demo, once I had a few skills unlocked that deepened my samurai improv routine. (I’m also fond of the fact that you can occasionally shove stray carts into enemies, or stab a plank of wood to use it as a shield, and then launch it at enemies as a projectile.)

My demo ended not too long after the segment we got to try at Summer Game Fest, pitting me against the mischievous Rasho-gan in a fantastic two-stage fight. It was still the standout sequence, even in an extended look at the game. After that, I was off to close a few more rifts in an even more demon-plagued part of town, culminating in a boss that felt much more manageable after going to war with Rasho-gan.

I only started to get a sense of where Way of the Sword is going once I was done, so I still have some lingering questions about the full game. As of now, the main one is what the balance is between linear levels and open-ended stages. Is the village a one-off area, or do Way of the Sword’s biggest beats happen in those spaces? I’m not able to see that structure just yet, but so long as the action keeps delivering, I imagine Capcom’s 2026 hot streak won’t end here.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword will be released on Sept. 4 for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.