By: Noah Nunez
General Reporter
“Onimusha: Way of the Sword” has to be one of the biggest disappointments I have had the displeasure of engaging with from a studio I adore, like Capcom.
Going into Onimusha with not only the context of Capcom’s incredible streak of work but also as a revival of an older franchise gave me so much hope in what this game could be. There is just one problem: they forgot to tell a story.
Onimusha sees Miyamoto Musashi, a clumsy but well-meaning samurai, wishing to fight his way to the top and make it as the greatest samurai ever to live.
And to the game’s credit, the opening to the game puts his dreams and goals on display in a wonderfully hilarious and gripping way.
Having Miyamoto Musashi start and win a fight against a samurai teacher, only to be chased out by that samurai’s students as he fights for his life, grabbing onto everything and using his surroundings, perfectly displays his resourceful and silly attitude.
But when he does subsequently die, only to be revived by a gauntlet that helps him slay the demon oni that populates Kyoto, his position shifts.
With this gauntlet giving him all the power he has strived so desperately to attain, his initial reaction to the gauntlet’s trivialization of his growth leaves him rather miffed.
It creates a clear divide between the wandering swordsman we see in the intro, and the demon-slaying Onimusha Musashi will become as he learns to lean on and help his eventual companions.
However, this never feels like a natural progression for him.
After the first chapter concludes and Musashi begins to befriend other people to show how power is not attained by yourself, or however you want to phrase the game’s moral, he takes a major backseat from the plot.
Instead of delving more into why Musashi wants to become so powerful by himself and how he is handling the power the gauntlet has given him, it instead turns into Assassin’s Creed.
Running back and forth between waypoints in an empty hub world, all so two characters can babble back and forth about nothing or to introduce another historical Japanese figure.
Musashi goes from a goofy samurai whose confidence matched his incredible skill to an errand boy transporting his gauntlet to places so it can do all the plot rather than himself.
It makes that moral I discussed earlier feel almost null by the end, when all Musashi has done is let other characters get involved in the deep politics of Kyoto while he stands on the sidelines and cracks a couple of jokes.
For as strong as Onimusha opens, I cannot help but feel the other 19 hours of the game I spent watching Musashi fall over was not because we would learn to see him lean on others; it was because everyone else realized they were more important and ditched him.
