Even before Onimusha: Way of the Sword came out, the topic of enemy and encounter difficulty was a contentious one. The pre-launch demo had players divided; Dom found the combat exciting and challenging, likening it to the Nioh series, whereas I thought it was a little too easy, almost like the game played itself.
Fast-forward to launch and the conversation around the million-seller Way of the Sword has changed. While some elements the demo was criticised for remain in the final release – chiefly the passive enemies that stand around waiting to be attacked – they’re much less pronounced. Speaking in a new interview, Way of the Sword game director Satoru Nihei has said he believes the level of challenge the team eventually arrived at was the right one.
“There are points where [players] do stumble, they do die, they do get defeated,” Nihei told PC Gamer. “But they’re able to overcome that and progress. That was what we set out to achieve in terms of pitching the difficulty for the game: We wanted players to be able to progress through the story, but also have some challenge to it, so they get a sense of satisfaction from defeating enemies.”
Nihei explained the team’s intention wasn’t for Way of the Sword “to be a particularly difficult game” like contemporaries such as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or the Nioh series. “We think it’s hit the right spot in terms of the difficulty, in terms of where we wanted to place it,” he added.
And based on in-game behaviour Capcom tracks, players seem to agree. “We’ve been looking at the data that comes back from people playing,” Nihei revealed, “so we can see where people are struggling and how they’re progressing through the game.
“What we’ve seen in the trends in the data is that it’s close to what we set out to achieve, in terms of difficulty.”
Onimusha: Way of the Sword has been critically acclaimed, hailed by many as the true successor to Sekiro and the new benchmark for parry-based combat. In Eurogamer’s Way of the Sword review, Dom Peppiatt was particularly impressed by the way it advances the action genre without relying on Soulslike tropes.
“There is no game out there that makes you feel more like a swordsman of legend than Onimusha: Way of the Sword,” Dom wrote.