After 2 Hours, Capcom's New Onimusha Is My Most-Anticipated Action Game of 2026

The samurai action revival has a lot of new tricks up its sleeve We’ve learned a whole lot about Onimusha: Way of the Sword since its reveal at the 2024 Game Awards. There have been multiple trailers teasing its story, and we’ve tried our hands at its thrilling combat in two separate demos. Even with all of that, I still have a lot of questions about Capcom’s Onimusha revival ahead of its Sept. 4 launch on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. After going hands-on with it once more, this time in a substantial two-hour demo, I have a much better sense of what Capcom is going for with Way of the Sword — and it's nothing like the original games. The heated boss duels are still the star of the show, but open-ended missions and a heavy emphasis on skill tree progression tease an entirely new start for the 25-year-old samurai series. We’ve known for a while that Way of the Sword wouldn’t be anything like its PS2 predecessors. The series’ first games were riffs on the early Resident Evil formula, complete with fixed camera angles. Way of the Sword retains the same pseudo-horror, but switches the action into a more modern third-person hack-and-slash format. But f