I've been glued to my PS5 Pro thanks to this banging Capcom release – September starts off strong
Onimusha is back, and it's pretty great
The tide of videogames shows no sign of abating – with September now hoving into view and promising a genuine deluge of new games, many of which are hugely anticipated. Capcom has one of the earliest slots in the month, with Onimusha: Way of the Sword arriving on 4 September, and I've played a whole heap of it on my PS5 Pro over the last 10 days.
It's a return for a franchise that hasn't had much love recently, other than some recent remasters of older titles, and it brings Onimusha kicking and screaming into 2026 with a pretty interesting approach to character action gaming.
Playing as Miyamoto Musashi, a samurai trying to become the greatest swordsman alive, you'll soon run into trouble and find yourself, well, dead. Revived with an Oni gauntlet on your arm, you'll be tasked with hunting down demons across a version of Kyoto that's been infected with miasmic nastiness.
It's a simple setup in some ways, but it's a little bit of a drag that the first couple of hours of Way of the Sword involve a heap of cutscenes for you to watch. The gaps between combat tutorials can feel torturous at times, even though those cutscenes are pretty terrific in production quality.
The facial animation on hand here is some of the most expressive I've ever seen in a major videogame, with Musashi's expressions in particular routinely causing me to chuckle. He's a refreshingly grumpy and curmudgeonly hero, although his real strength is with the sword.
On that front, Way of the Sword is impressively traditional. While it has moved to an over-the-shoulder camera that you can freely manipulate, its adherence to a core system of parries, dodges, light and heavy attacks really works nicely. You get special moves to earn during fights, and a variety of items to find that can help you, but the combat loop is actually quite simple.
It's dead effective, though, thanks to enemies whose attack patterns can often be surprising and deadly – in particular any time you face off against a boss. These tend to come when you find rifts of particularly concentrated evil energy, and the ones I've fought have all been memorable and rewarding.
The game's visual design is also really quite lovely in places – although it does suffer from the fact that the cuts between cutscenes and gameplay often involve obvious lighting downgrades.
On the PS5 Pro, though, Way of the Sword comes with a heap of graphical options to choose from. You can toggle between a 30FPS quality mode or a 60FPS performance one, but also up to a 120Hz option, too, while a separate frame-rate limiter is a rare addition on console.
It includes a 40FPS mode that might be a favourite for some people, and you can also choose to toggle ray-tracing on or off, as an added tweak. I've been playing at 60FPS with ray-tracing on, and have found the game pretty great to look at, albeit some recent Capcom releases (like Resident Evil Requiem) have wowed me more.
I'm keen to get further into Way of the Sword to discover whether its combat system has more surprises to keep things switched up, but from the roughly five hours I've played so far, it's been really fun and old-school. A semi-open hub area that funnels you towards objectives is fun to explore, but I prefer the linear levels even more.
These are where the game feels closest to its older PlayStation 2 roots, but you can still detect this elsewhere. It's there when you, for example, keep attacking in one direction while an enemy moves, and realise that you're not just going to magically magnetise onto them for continued hits.
These touches make Onimusha: Way of the Sword feel like a clever reinvention of the franchise for a modern world in which people love retro gaming. People want games to feel like they're still a continuation of what came before, even if they're actually substantially modernised in most ways, and this first massive release of September ticks that box smartly.
