← Back to ArticlesHow Hard Is Onimusha: Way of the Sword
An HDII editorial - published 9/9/2026 · 3 min read
Onimusha: Way of the Sword gets sold on its swordplay, and the swordplay is excellent. It is also not trying to ruin your week. HDII voters have it at 6.94/10 across 17 ratings, and nine of those seventeen votes landed on a flat 6. The spread only climbs into 9 and 10 territory twice. That is the profile of a game people cleared without ever getting stuck.
Where it lands against the soulslikes
Below all of them. Every FromSoftware game on this site outranks it, starting with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice at 8.59/10 and running down through Bloodborne at 8.16, Dark Souls at 8.11 and Dark Souls III at 8.02. Lies of P, the closest genre neighbour in tone, sits at 8.38. Even Elden Ring, the softest of the mainline FromSoft entries at 7.60/10 across 83 votes, clears Onimusha by more than half a point.
Sharp combat, generous framing
The Sekiro comparison is the obvious one and it breaks down fast. Both games hand you one sword and ask you to meet attacks head on rather than roll away from them. Sekiro then builds an entire game around punishing you for getting that timing wrong. Onimusha builds its Issen counter as a reward instead of a toll. Land it and a fight collapses in your favour. Miss it and you are usually still standing, still in the fight, still able to fall back on normal attacks and soul absorption to grind the encounter down the slow way.
The bosses are the point
Difficulty and quality get treated as the same axis, and Onimusha is a clean argument against that. The boss roster is the strongest part of the game by consensus, with distinct movesets, real theatre and fights that actually respond to how aggressively you play. Almost none of them are attempt sinks. You read the pattern, you use the counter, you win in two or three tries. The fights are memorable because they are well designed, not because they cost you an evening.
Difficulty was never the pitch
Capcom did not market this as a test. It is a revival of a series that has been dormant for two decades, aimed at people who want to feel like a swordsman for fifteen hours, and it delivers exactly that. The critical reception has been strong and the complaints have been about pacing and length rather than about being too soft. A 6.94 is not a mark against it. Plenty of the games sitting above it in the rankings are worse.
Is Onimusha: Way of the Sword Hard? Final Verdict
Not particularly. At 6.94/10 on HDII it is a moderately demanding action game that expects you to learn a parry and then lets you use it, and anyone who has finished a soulslike will walk through it. Come for the combat and the bosses. If you want a wall to break yourself against, Sekiro is still sitting right there at 8.59.
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