Capcom’s Onimusha: Way of the Sword will be remembered for many reasons, including its successful revival of the long-dormant franchise. We’ve gushed about the combat and animation quality, but it’s easy to overlook how much work went into making it all possible.
In a recent interview with PC Gamer, director Satoru Nihei said, “Starting the project six years ago, we felt it was important to have that detail to sell the power and the excitement of the action, so it’s something we really focused on.”
“Even at that starting point, we knew it was something that Capcom, as a company, have as a great strength: We have a lot of assets and tech available to us that allow us to create these varieties of actions. That’s something we really felt we could leverage to make the game really stand out that a lot of other places can’t really copy.
“On top of producing a lot of animations and motion capture, we have to give a lot of credit to the programmers for taking that data and putting it in a form that we can have them make these very smooth transitions, with these physics-based calculations, to go from one animation to another. It was a big team effort in getting the animations to look how they do.”
Of course, Nihei and the team are particularly proud of the dismemberment system. It’s one of those features that it couldn’t do before, so seeing it come out so well, especially after such a long development period, is great.
“If you slash enemies with certain attacks, they get cut in the exact path that a sword passes through. While that’s something that has been done in the past in other games, one of the challenges and things we built on that was brand new with Onimusha was having that happen along with enemies still being animated as they’re dying and dropping.
“In lots of other games you’d cut them, they’d kind of freeze when you do the cut and then fall apart. We had to have the programmers add to RE Engine to be able to enable that to really sell the impact of moves like the Issen. That was something brand new added to the engine.”
For those who have only played games like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which also features a dismemberment system, Way of the Sword is a huge contrast because you don’t have such extensive slicing freedom. Interestingly, Nihei and the team took this into account.
“In other games where you have that ability to cut up anything—just because of the tempo and style of game we wanted to make, it wasn’t something we considered for Onimusha. Choosing exactly which direction and how you want to cut, we didn’t think it was a good match for this particular title. Rather, we wanted to have something that happened reactively to how you’re playing, to show off the power of the abilities.”
The results speak for themselves, as Onimusha: Way of the Sword sold over one million copies on its first day. It also garnered strong critical acclaim with an 85 Metascore based on 104 reviews. You can check out our thoughts here. We scored it an 8, with the biggest highlights being the combat, boss fights, and Musashi’s characterization, even though the exploration and world design (especially in the hub areas) could have used a bit more work.
