- Primary Subject: Onimusha: Way of the Sword difficulty and design
- Key Update: Players are misunderstanding the game's intended difficulty and design by relying on difficulty mods.
- Status: published
- Last Verified: 2026-09-09
- Quick Answer: This article argues that Onimusha: Way of the Sword's difficulty is intentionally designed and often misunderstood, with mods detracting from the intended experience.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a fantastic action game. One that’s been somewhat misunderstood, and that I truly believe you aren’t properly engaging with if you genuinely believe you need difficulty mods to enhance your experience, at least on a first playthrough.
Like I said in my review, the game’s tempo might lead you to believe it has more in common with Soulslikes than it actually does. That, inherently, carries an expectation when it comes to how hard it will be. FromSoftware is known for being utterly punishing, locking players in a steady whirl of frustration, repetition, and eventual success via trial and error.
The vapid, surface-level assumption that Onimusha was Capcom’s foray into the genre immediately clashed with players’ first taste of its combat via a demo, which was surprisingly easy. Enemy NPC behavior was overly passive, almost to the point of being comical. That’s because the demo was more focused on serving as a way for players to ease into the game’s mechanics, rather than being a vertical slice of what it would eventually offer.
The discourse during the weeks leading up to launch focused almost solely on how fans wanted Capcom to amp up the difficulty. Even when the full game was finally in the hands of fans across the globe, a few modders decided to mess with the game’s original vision by making NPC behavior much more aggressive, thus defeating the purpose of the entire game.
Onimusha isn’t meant to be played like a Devil May Cry-esque hack-and-slash. Enemies aren’t there to overwhelm you, forcing you to mindlessly mash your basic attacks, throwing in the occasional parry or dodge to avoid the constant barrage of attacks coming your way. While early sections will be easy for action game veterans, Way of the Sword’s brilliance is in how it progressively ramps up its difficulty curve, but also its cool factor.
Those initial hours are there to ease you into the gameplay loop, to teach you Issen timings or when to perfectly dodge to avoid a command grab. It’s a power fantasy in which you, as a legendary swordsman overcharged with the might of the Oni, can easily dispose of three or four foul creatures with a couple of sword slashes.
The mods I’ve seen some people use online rob you of this experience. It turns combat into a bogged-down, obtuse, messy, generic, poorly designed, run-of-the-mill action game that will rarely give you an opportunity to truly make use of the game’s core mechanics. At that point, you’re not really playing Onimusha, but the approximation of what ChatGPT would consider an action game to look like.
If you’re mad that random mobs aren’t giving you a hard time, you’ve missed the entire thematic and mechanical point of Capcom’s idea for this Onimusha revival. They are fodder for you to aura farm with. The challenge is not "can I survive them?" as much as it is "can I chain Issen my way through five of these Genma at the same time?"
Style is a big part of what makes Way of the Sword stand out; the boss set pieces are quite possibly some of the best I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s where the game truly shines. All the in-between encounters serve to pump up your ego just to have it crushed when you inevitably run into a big baddie that will truly test how much you’ve mastered all the tools at Musashi’s disposal.
As I said, I don’t think Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a hard game. It’s not trying to be, despite having a ton of fun, challenging boss fights toward the latter half of the game. And yes, I do agree difficulty should’ve ramped up a little bit sooner, but pretending you need the generic Genma mobs to be moving like mini-bosses each time you run into them is acting disingenuous toward the purpose they serve and tells me you truly don’t understand how to engage with an action game like Onimusha.
And that’s it. Stick with us at Gfinityesports.com: your go-to source for all things Onimusha.