Action games have taken a turn over the last decade or so. While everyone was chasing the Devil May Cry train during the 2000s, once FromSoftware birthed the Soulslike genre, the genre has pivoted. The likes of The First Berserker: Khazan or Stellar Blade would pull me in with their action game stylings only to reveal the Souls influence, but not everyone is chasing the same trend.
Recently some action games have been pushing back on that and returning to the conventional action style, with the devs of Phantom Blade 0 being extremely insistent that the game is not a soulslike. And now Capcom's Onimusha: Way of the Sword is joining that wave of classic action game revivals.
Speaking to Automaton, director Satoru Nihei says: "Way of The Sword isn't an open-world game, and it certainly isn't a punishing die-and-retry (soulslike) game either." Nihei added, "While there's no doubt seasoned action-game players will be able to enjoy it, our goal was to make a game which gamers who don't consider action games their forte will also have fun playing. In Way of The Sword, our main focus was to express the clashing of blades through the action."
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The original Onimusha titles were linear action games that were more akin to a samurai version of Resident Evil than the more hardcore action game stylings of Devil May Cry (which, ironically, was originally a Resident Evil game). So it's refreshing to hear that the return of the series after almost two decades is sticking to its guns in an industry where that type of game is far less common, at least in the mainstream AAA part of it.
Ninja Gaiden 4 devs say "Soulslikes have kind of taken center stage" since the last installment in the series, but "we are going against the trend in that way."
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