Onimusha: Way of the Sword — meet Shizuka, the Genma, and the horror lurking in Dokyo's lab

Onimusha: Way of the Sword launches next month, ending a 20-year gap in Capcom's samurai action series. Game Informer visited Capcom's Osaka HQ to play several hours of the game and interview the team — and the coverage reveals a lot about the story's key players.

The most intriguing new character is Shizuka, a mysterious ethereal woman trapped inside protagonist Miyamoto Musashi's Oni Gauntlet. Lead writer Hiroshi Yamashita explains she was designed partly for practical reasons: Musashi arrives in early Edo-period Kyoto alone, and having him mutter exposition to himself would have felt unnatural, so Shizuka serves as a guide who explains the city, the Genma threat, and the wider world to players unfamiliar with the setting. But she's more than a tutorial device — director Satoru Nihei says Musashi's reluctant relationship with the gauntlet itself is central to his arc. Unlike previous Onimusha heroes Samanosuke Akechi and Jubei Yagyu, who embraced Oni power, Musashi despises the gauntlet and wants it gone. Nihei says that tension — a warrior who wants to win on pure skill being saddled with power he rejects — is what makes this protagonist different. Shizuka, for her part, is sorry for dragging Musashi into the situation and wants to be freed from the gauntlet. Yamashita says her role deepens as the story progresses, and the journalist who played the game notes a quiet, unresolved tension between the two — whether camaraderie, romance, or something else.

On the enemy side, the Genma are back and Yamashita laid out their cosmology: the Oni rule a parallel Hell and have historically kept the Genma contained, but growing malice generated by human violence on Earth is tearing open rifts in Kyoto, letting demons bleed through. Most Genma operate on pure instinct — kill, eat, spread chaos — but a scheming inner circle has a specific objective that the accumulating malice is building toward. Yamashita wouldn't say what that objective is, but confirmed that Nobunaga, the recurring villain of earlier games, is not returning. Two named high-ranking Genma have been shown so far: Rasho-Gan and Dokyo, the latter of whom Yamashita describes as having a "special" and "unique" place in the story. Dokyo kidnaps people — including children — and fuses them with animals in an underground lab beneath Kyoto. The sequence set in that lab crosses from dark fantasy into outright horror: shoji screens silhouette mutated bodies, blood drips down torch-lit corridors, and kimonos hang from the rafters above screaming subjects. Nihei likens it to a "classic Japanese ghost house" and says it's one of the more extreme stages in the game, designed specifically around Dokyo's twisted nature rather than as a template for the whole experience — Way of the Sword is not a horror game, Capcom insists, even if this section has genuine jump scares.

Game Informer's month-long coverage of Way of the Sword is ongoing, with more exclusive gameplay videos and behind-the-scenes content still to come on the Game Informer YouTube channel. The game itself launches next month on platforms Capcom has previously announced.