No, Onimusha: Way of the Sword is not a souls-like. Director Satoru Nihei has described it directly as a character-action game, and Capcom has been consistent about that in interviews through 2026.
The confusion is real and it has a source: Steam users applied a “Souls-like” tag to the store page, because the combat is built on parries and a signature counter. That is a player-applied tag, not Capcom’s own classification.
Why People Keep Asking
The surface features overlap with the genre in ways that are easy to mistake for lineage.
Combat revolves around reading an attack and answering it precisely, and the Issen counter rewards timing over aggression the way a souls-like parry does. Enemies punish button mashing. The setting is gloomy and the stakes are grim.
What is missing is most of what actually defines the genre. This is not built around corpse runs, recoverable currency dropped on death, interlinked shortcut-based level design, or an intentionally punishing difficulty curve as the core experience.
What Capcom Says It Is Instead
Nihei and producer Akihito Kadowaki have framed the design around accessibility rather than difficulty. They have said explicitly that they did not set out to make an impossibly difficult game.
The intended satisfaction is cutting enemies down cleanly with well-timed Issen counters, not surviving forty attempts at a tutorial boss. That is a character-action goal, in the lineage of Capcom’s own action games, rather than a souls-like one.
But It Is Not Easy
Worth being clear, because “not a souls-like” gets misread as “not challenging.”
After players called the demo too easy, Capcom added two difficulty presets plus modular settings on top, so you can tune story and action difficulty separately and adjust between them. Kadowaki also pushed back on the demo impression directly, noting it was a slice of the early story and that the bosses and regular Genma put up a tougher fight in the full game.
That plays out: the challenge ramps considerably past the opening hours. Our guide on changing difficulty covers where those settings live, which is not the options menu most people check first.
So Should You Play It?
If you came for souls-like structure, expect something different. There is no bonfire loop and no death tax on your progress.
If you came for souls-like combat feel, you will get on with it. The defensive game is the game, and Issen is as demanding as any parry window in the genre.
If souls-likes usually put you off on difficulty, this is the rare game in that neighbourhood built to let you dial it in rather than gate you out.
The defensive tools are where the learning curve actually sits, and how to parry, deflect and Issen breaks down the four options that new players most often blur together. Our full Onimusha Way of the Sword guides cover the rest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Onimusha Way of the Sword a souls-like? No. Director Satoru Nihei calls it a character-action game. The souls-like tag on Steam was applied by users, not Capcom.
Why is it tagged souls-like on Steam? Steam tags are user-applied, and the parry-and-counter combat resembles the genre even though the structure does not.
Is it hard? It ramps up well past the demo. Capcom added two presets plus modular settings after feedback, so you can tune action and story difficulty separately.
Do you lose progress when you die? No. There is no souls-style currency loss or corpse run.