Twenty years. That’s how long Capcom let the Onimusha series sit in a drawer before Onimusha: Way of the Sword arrived and immediately started climbing.
It debuted Friday at No. 6 on Steam. SteamDB recorded 40,000 active players on day one, which is no small thing when you’re launching the same week as The Blood of Dawnwalker.
Then the weekend happened.
From sixth to first in a single day
Twenty-four hours after release, Way of the Sword was the No. 1 selling game on Steam, ahead of both Halloween: The Game and WARDOGS. By Saturday, SteamDB clocked 74,575 active players. Nearly double the launch-day figure, in one turn of the calendar.
The game is set in a reimagined Edo-period Kyoto, and it’s Capcom’s first mainline entry in the series since Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams in 2006. If you were old enough to play that one on a PlayStation 2, congratulations, you’ve been waiting since the second George W. Bush term.
The critics are mostly on board, with one recurring complaint
Sales charts tell you people bought it. Reviews tell you whether they should have. As of this writing the game holds a Metacritic score of 85 and mostly positive reviews.
The knock, almost everywhere, is the combat. It repeats.
Giovanni Colantoni of Polygon called the game “a battle worth surviving,” though only sometimes, pointing at routine fights, recycled bosses and a progression system that doesn’t pay you back enough for the hours. “It feels like a great 12-hour game stretched to an exhausting 25-hour one. Piecemeal progression and recycled bosses go hand-in-hand with repetitive rift-closing missions and backtracks through previous levels to clear busy work sidequests,” Colantoni said.
Same criticism, opposite verdict
Chris Carter of ScreenRant flagged the same recycled bosses and enemies and then shrugged them off. “Even with some of those shortcomings, Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a triumph. There’s a lot to really dig into here if you’re a hardcore action fan, especially if you jack up the difficulty and let it rip,” Carter said.
And Will Borger of IGN didn’t hedge at all.
“There are moments in Onimusha: Way of the Sword where everything else fades. The controller falls away, the universe collapses, and the distance between you and Miyamoto Musashi is annihilated. There is nothing but move and counter move, sword clashing against sword, call and response. You will risk everything for another moment, another chance, and do it again and again until you claim victory or your chances are spent,” Borger said.
