Way Of The Sword Has An Unbelievably Cool Parry System

I saw Onimusha: Way of the Sword’s first gameplay reveal at Summer Games Fest earlier this year and walked away impressed. Last week, I also got to play through the same early game section of Onimusha myself, coming away even more impressed. Capcom showed off a lot of cool technical tricks and combat techniques in the preview, but I had to play it myself to understand exactly what Onimusha is all about.

It’s Dark Souls-esque, though not nearly as punishing as the FromSoft series. Timing and spacing are key to managing the small groups of men and monsters (called Genma) that stand in protagonist Musashi Miyamoto’s path. But where other similar action games lean into brutal challenge, Onimusha places the emphasis on style.

Musashi slices through Genma like they’re made of paper and effortlessly deflects their advances, knocking them off-balance and setting them up for cinematic counter attacks. Parries are always contextual to the enemy and the angle of attack, and every interaction feels organic. A lot of games have cool counters, but Onimusha’s parries are some of the nastiest I’ve ever seen.

An Onimusha Parry Isn’t Just A Super Block

Onimusha Way Of The Sword Musashi Fighting Ganryu

I didn’t realize how uninspired parries are in other action games until I saw how Onimusha does it. Parrying is a nearly universal mechanic in modern action games. Almost any game with a block will have some kind of counter-attack if you manage to block with perfect timing. Oftentimes, executing a perfect block will trigger a unique animation as your character deflects an attack and answers it with their own.

What’s so compelling about Onimusha’s parry is that it doesn’t lock you into any kind of pre-rendered counter animation. Instead, parries do what an actual parry would do, they throw the enemy off balance, setting them up for a follow up attack. From what I’ve seen so far, there aren’t any specific parries or counter attacks. It’s a true parry, and I don’t know if any game has done that before.

I first noticed there was something unique about the parry while deflecting arrows. I was curious if deflecting an arrow would send it flying back at the enemy that fired it. It does not, which sounds disappointing, but what it does is actually much cooler. You can block an arrow by holding up your sword and it will hit your blade and bounce off. But, if you block just as the arrow is about to hit you, Mushashi will slice through the air and direct it straight down where it will stick into the ground, broken in the center of the shaft.

This is how all parries work in Onimusha. Musashi uses his blade to redirect incoming attackers, using their momentum against them to disrupt and destabilize them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a flying arrow or a Genma charging at you with a massive spear. Musashi parries the way a real samurai would.

Disrupting Attacks And Attacking Back

Onimusha Deflecting Spinning Enemy Attack.

It’s one thing to parry a rival swordsman to watch him clumsily stumble past you as you turn and stab him in the back, but it doesn’t take long before you start to encounter weirder creatures that move in inhuman ways – this is when Musashi’s parry in Onimusha: Way of the Sword starts to shine.

Some freaky guys await you in the temple. One is a big flying puffer fish that spits globs of goo at you, and the other is a big bony lizard-like thing with a long tail that it wraps around its body, turning into a big wheel. Naturally, it then tries to roll into you, knocking you over so that it’s easier for the fish thing to spit its juice on you (there’s a lot of weird little guys in this game).

Main character of Onimusha Way of the Sword

Since you don’t want any of those things to happen, the best strategy is to square up with the wheel guy and parry the attack. You can deflect the wheel away from you with perfect timing and send it careening into a nearby rock or tree. The parried monster will wobble before smacking into an obstacle and crumpling onto the ground in the most satisfying way. This gives you an opening to casually walk up and drive your blade into whatever you estimate is its head.

Maybe that doesn’t sound that revolutionary. Even when Capcom itself demoed the feature for me at SGF, I didn’t fully grasp what made it so cool. It took playing it myself to understand how natural the parry feels in action. I hope Capcom releases a demo so everyone can get a chance to see it for themselves. I’ve seen a lot of cool parries, but this one is the coolest.