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Capcom Spent Six Years and Two of Them Just Getting a Dead Actor's Face
When a franchise goes dark for two decades, the comeback either feels desperate or deliberate. Onimusha: Way of the Sword reads as the latter, and the reasoning Capcom has laid out in recent interviews explains why.
The game is the first mainline installment in the Onimusha series since Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams in 2006. That's a long gap, and Capcom has been unusually candid about exactly why it happened.
Why It Took This Long
The honest answer, per the people who made it: scheduling reality. Producer Akihito Kadowaki explained that while Onimusha was always well-received, other major series — Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, Street Fighter — consumed the studio's development bandwidth, and as games became larger and more expensive to build, assembling a team for a new Onimusha proved consistently difficult.
It ultimately took the RE Engine reaching maturity and a soft reset in 2020, when Capcom looked at scheduling out its next-generation slate, for Onimusha's return to become viable. The team has been working on Way of the Sword for six years. That's not a rushed sequel; that's a studio treating a dormant IP as a genuine long-cycle project.
The Toshiro Mifune Gambit
The detail that tells you most about the kind of comeback this is: the game has been in production since 2020, and it took the team roughly two years just to get permission to use the likeness of late actor Toshiro Mifune as protagonist Miyamoto Musashi — with Capcom finally reaching an agreement with Mifune Productions in the early phase of development.
Mifune died in 1997. The idea to use him came from director Satoru Nihei's attempt to visualize what made samurai genuinely compelling — the tenacity of someone who keeps fighting despite the odds — and his search through classical Japanese cinema for a young samurai who fights "roughly, covered in blood and mud." Mifune was the answer.
Capcom considered Mifune integral to capturing the right aesthetic spirit, and committing significant development time to securing a dead actor's estate is not the move of a studio looking for a quick franchise reboot. It's a statement of aesthetic intent.
Why Kyoto, and Why the Edo Period
The original four Onimusha games were set during the Sengoku period — Japan's age of warring states. Way of the Sword moves to the early Edo period, placing the story in a more settled, culturally charged era. That's a meaningful shift, which creates a different kind of atmosphere than open battlefield chaos.
Kyoto itself was the result of deep research, not just aesthetics. The team spent considerable time securing permission to use locations normally inaccessible to the public — including the well at Kyoto's Rokudō Chinnō-ji, a Buddhist temple with centuries of history. According to legend, the well was used to travel to the realm of Enma — the King of Hell — and the area around the temple sat near an ancient cremation ground, making it a legendary crossroads between the living world and the afterlife. For a franchise built on demons bleeding through into feudal Japan, that's not just set dressing. It's load-bearing mythology.
What They Changed — and What They Kept
The developers moved away from the weapon-swapping mechanics of old, replacing them with a focus on single-katana mastery elevated by nuanced parry systems and an RE Engine-powered "free-cut" system for the iconic Issen counters.
Director Nihei has explicitly stated the game is not a Soulslike — despite genre comparisons that have circulated since the reveal — and the structure is what he describes as "wide-linear": a main quest with a linear spine, but Kyoto areas that expand in size as the story progresses, offering optional side quests.
The story is a completely standalone narrative with no connections to any previous Onimusha game or the 2024 Netflix animated series — likely a deliberate decision to let newcomers enter without franchise homework.
That combination — standalone story, focused combat, deliberate world research — reads as a team that studied what made the originals feel specific rather than just replicating their mechanics. Whether it sticks the landing is a separate question, and not one anyone can answer yet. But the construction is coherent.
The Broader Read
Capcom used The Game Awards 2024 to announce revivals for both Onimusha and Okami simultaneously — two franchises that had been sitting dormant for years. That framing matters. These weren't nostalgia cash-grabs timed to a quiet quarter; they were announced alongside the studio's biggest existing franchises, treated as tentpoles.
Six years of development, extended time securing a film estate for one actor's face, researchers consulting temple officials, a setting shift to a historically distinct period — the picture of Way of the Sword that emerges from Capcom's interviews is of a studio that decided, when it finally had the window and the engine, to swing.
Our take. The design choices here — Mifune's likeness, the temple research, the deliberate setting shift from Sengoku to Edo — are the kind of specific commitments that tend to produce games with a genuine identity rather than franchise-by-committee. That's a good sign, even before anyone finishes the campaign.
What to watch. Upon release, how the game performs in its first weeks — player reception, critical response, and whether the "wide-linear" structure lands with an audience that's been conditioned on open worlds — will tell us whether Capcom's measured approach found its moment.
Bottom line. Capcom didn't just bring Onimusha back — they spent years deciding exactly what it should be.