Onimusha has been gone long enough that most people writing about it now weren’t playing it the first time around. The mainline series stopped in the PS2 era. Capcom spent the intervening years building Monster Hunter into a monolith, reviving Resident Evil twice over, and turning Devil May Cry into a stylistic benchmark. Onimusha sat in the vault.
Way of the Sword is the answer to what happens when Capcom finally opens it. PC Gamer’s review lands on the part that matters: the combat is ferociously good, and it’s strong enough to drag a long-dormant series back into relevance. That’s a narrow claim, and it’s the right one to make.
Combat as the entire pitch
Action games in 2026 are crowded. FromSoftware set the terms for deliberate, punishing melee. Capcom’s own catalog covers the flashy end. A revived Onimusha has to justify itself in a space where “good sword fighting” is table stakes, not a selling point.
So the framing in the reviews is worth reading carefully. Not “a faithful revival.” Not “nostalgic return to form.” The praise is aimed squarely at how it feels to parry and cut, which suggests Capcom knew exactly which part of the original had aged well and which parts hadn’t. The original games were built on tank-adjacent controls, fixed cameras, and soul absorption between fights. Almost none of that survives contact with modern expectations. The one thing that does is the tension of a well-timed counter.
If the combat lands, the series has a future. If it hadn’t, this would be another Capcom curio filed next to Dragon’s Dogma’s decade of silence.
The launch machinery around it
Meanwhile the release coverage looks like every other big publisher drop. Polygon ran the standard piece: unlock times mapped across time zones, breakdown of what each edition gets you, what pre-ordering adds. Useful, and also completely interchangeable with the same article written for any other release this year.
That’s not a knock on Polygon. It’s what readers search for at midnight. But the existence of a tiered-edition explainer for a franchise that’s been dead for two decades says something about how Capcom is positioning this. Way of the Sword isn’t being marketed as a cult revival for the faithful. It’s being sold as a mainline tentpole, with the full apparatus that implies.
The risk is obvious. Tentpole positioning means tentpole sales expectations, and a series with no active audience has to build one from scratch off the strength of the moment-to-moment play. Capcom has done exactly this before with Resident Evil 7 and with Monster Hunter: World.
Whether it works here comes down to whether people who’ve never touched an Onimusha game pick up a controller and feel the difference in the first hour of swordplay.