Not Everything Needs To Be A Soulslike, And Onimusha: Way Of The Sword Shows Why

In 2011, Dark Souls let players praise the sun, and that sun cast a shadow long enough to engulf the whole industry. The action-RPG--boosted by its spiritual predecessor, Demon’s Souls--kickstarted a new subgenre with a refreshing level of boldness that made it unignorable for any developer making a game with a sword. It was a paradigm shift that swallowed the action genre and meant almost everything was molded after Dark Souls and its stamina meter, methodical movement, and esoteric world. Even with small deviations here and there, there was seemingly little room for action games unwilling to stick to this blueprint. This dearth of variety is precisely what makes Onimusha: Way of the Sword so refreshing. Instead of capitulating to trends, Capcom’s latest hit bravely demonstrates a level of versatility action games should have had all this time in this post-Dark Souls world. Way of the Sword sheds a number of key soulslike principles. There are no bonfires that repopulate the lands, interlocking paths filled with shortcuts, corpse runs, stamina bars to micromanage, obnoxious boss runbacks, or obtuse lore bits hidden in item descriptions that require VaatiVidya explainers to fully …