Capcom reboots Onimusha and it looks like the Resident Evil remakes-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

When this comes out, it will have been 20 years since the last proper Onimusha game (Capcom)

Onimusha: Way Of The Sword has had a surprise reveal at The Game Awards 2024 and it’s looking pretty spectacular.

They’ve been promising for years that they’d use their recent run of success to revive some of their older franchises and now Capcom has finally made good on that vow, not just with a new Ōkami sequel, but also Onimusha: Way Of The Sword.

The reveal trailer at The Game Awards 2024 was quite brief, so it’s not actually clear if it’s a sequel or not, but given it’s been 18 years (20 by the time the game is out) since the last mainline entry in the franchise we’re going to assume Capcom is going for a relatively fresh start here.

It might be brief, but the announcement trailer seems to at least be partially real-time, with visuals very reminiscent of the Resident Evil remakes, or to put it another way the game looks amazing.

What is Onimusha?

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, Onimusha was a samurai action game from 2001 that pitted you against an evil army of demons (*oni* is a type of demon and *musha* means warrior). It saw several sequels throughout the mid-2000s, with the last proper entry being in 2006.

Way Of The Sword is currently scheduled for a 2026 release and while what snippets of gameplay we do get focus on the visceral swordplay, the new protagonist can also be seen absorbing glowing red orbs into his gauntlet, confirming the return of one of Onimusha’s key gameplay mechanics.

In the previous games, defeating enemies would reward you with their souls, which could be absorbed in order to refill your health and power up your weapons.

It’s entirely appropriate that this new Onimusha would take visual cues from the Resident Evil remakes, since the first game was originally conceived as a ninja-themed take on Capcom’s survival horror series.

It eventually evolved to be more action orientated, but it did retain Resident Evil’s fixed camera angles; something that has unsurprisingly been dropped for Way Of The Sword.

While the Onimusha series appeared to come to an end in 2006, it wasn’t completely abandoned by Capcom, and the publisher may have been gauging interest in a potential revival for some time now.

Aside from a multiplatform remaster of the original Onimusha released in early 2019, the series received an animated Netflix series from famed Japanese director Takashi Miike last year.

When will Onimusha: Way Of The Sword be released?

Capcom seem pretty confident about a 2026 release date but there’s no more detail than that, which of course leaves plenty of scope for a delay.

The game will be released on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC. Although the question for any game coming out in 2026 and beyond is whether it’ll also be on Nintendo Switch 2.

We don’t know how Onimusha fans felt about the Netflix show and the remaster reportedly didn’t sell particularly well, but Capcom must have a lot of faith in this revival to make it look as good as it does.

Now, if only they’d do Dino Crisis next…

The action’s looking particularly violent and bloody (Capcom)

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