If Way of the Sword had to be summed up in a single word, that word would be “cinematic.” The game seizes every available opportunity to hand you a beautifully rendered, sharply directed animated cutscene, and a part of me kept asking whether this material might have served better as a samurai action film than as a game.
That impression only deepens thanks to the score, which leans hard into traditional Japanese instrumentation. The environments do the same work — each one unmistakably Japanese in inspiration and framed to feel as vast as possible.
You can clearly tell the pre-rendered cutscenes apart from the in-engine ones, and the facial work slips into uncanny territory on more than one occasion — the mouth movements and exposed teeth are the usual culprits. Even so, measured against what the Switch 2 typically delivers, it’s a genuinely impressive showing. The game runs locked at 30 FPS, and every element on screen is constructed to seem enormous and menacing.
The oni are the best thing here
Whether the reaction they’re chasing is revulsion or dread, the oni designs and the action set pieces reliably land it. Each boss is styled with a warped body-horror sensibility, as though something had climbed straight out of a traditional Japanese painting.
Plenty of them end up being dealt with in much the same way (I’ll get to that), yet every single one stuck with me. Meeting a new enemy, taking the measure of an intimidating new threat, probing different attack patterns and puzzling out fresh counters — that’s where the game peaked.
Dozens of cutscenes, almost no story
Given how strenuously this game works to construct an unbroken cinematic experience that keeps you in the thick of the action, the narrative underneath is remarkably thin.
Cutscenes arrive by the dozen, along with a steady procession of new faces who turn up to assist Musashi along the way. Take a step back and trace the arc, though, and what you’re left with is Musashi bumping into one person after another who tells him what to do next.
Pull it apart and it’s really a collection of miniature stories, each built around Musashi dealing with a particular character or a particular one-off threat. Nothing establishes who these figures are or why they abruptly warrant attention — the game seems to be leaning on the fact that many of them nod to real Japanese historical figures. As a way of pointing players toward a slice of Japan’s history they can go read about afterward, that’s perfectly good. What it shouldn’t be is a shortcut for granting instant significance to characters whose main function is dispensing the next objective.
The formula runs like this: someone new appears, I clear a batch of fetch quests or finish a job on their behalf, and a particular threat turns out to be bound up with that same person. A handful of these missions carry real tragedy. Others boil down to “clear the enemies here to move on”.
Things get graphic enough that the horrors visited on these characters — or on the people they love — are easy to feel bad about. But the emotional beats land about as heavily as watching a villain kick a puppy. Something registers briefly, then evaporates, which is a shame considering the effort the cutscenes, the voice performances and the direction are all pouring in.
Musashi doesn’t change
None of this brutality leaves an interesting mark on Musashi himself. He goes through the entire game without a character arc, unless you count him grudgingly accepting some responsibility for a role he never chose.
The nearest thing to a theme is an interrogation of what strength really means. Does strength lie in lifting other people up, or in treating them as tools? That’s a reasonable question. It’s also simple enough that all the presentation stacked around it goes to waste, and across most of the runtime the game never persuades me that Musashi has meaningfully changed.
The combat understands what it’s doing
On the subject of not changing meaningfully: the moment-to-moment play highlights much of what makes an action RPG work. Musashi wields both single-handed and two-handed sword strikes, and mashing buttons will get you nowhere.
Both you and your opponents have a health bar and a stamina meter. The idea is to drain the enemy’s stamina as low as possible so that finishers tear through their health at a much faster rate. Ordinary attacks whittle it down gradually. Sub weapons and precisely timed parries strip it away far more quickly.
Here’s the part I appreciated: whatever tactic dispatches a small enemy also works on a boss. What separates them is purely how aggressive each type is. Openings come from disciplined timing on your parries and deflects. The individual moves are easy to understand, and the real skill is recognising the right moment for each.
The scaling holds up too, even as you collect items out in the overworld or earn them by helping villagers, upgrading abilities and growing stronger. You never tip over into feeling overpowered, and you’re never thrown at something you couldn’t plausibly beat.
Then the structure eats it alive
The systems end up squandered in exactly the way the presentation is. The plot reduces to characters doling out assignments to Musashi across the Kyoto overworld, and not even the fast travel options that unlock broader areas can hold the repetition at bay.
Head to an area, cut down a pile of enemies, clear a single action set piece, take on a new boss. Then move to the next area, cut down a pile of enemies, clear a single action set piece, possibly take on a new boss. The loop keeps going until it dawns on you that several hours could have been trimmed for something far tighter.
The boss encounters remained a high point from beginning to end. Even so, I reached a stage where the opening stretch of each new story chapter filled me with no anticipation at all, because that’s precisely where the game goes on autopilot. I’d absorbed the mechanics so completely that cutting through cannon fodder registered as busywork rather than combat — in other words, the game penalises me for having improved at it.
The villains show up too late
Since the payoff for most of these missions rings hollow both narratively and emotionally, entire chunks come across as filler. Worse still, the primary antagonist and the main rival, both introduced right at the outset, vanish for close to a dozen hours of play.
It’s a genuine waste, since several of these villains have personality to spare. They’re either dispatched the instant they appear or kept off-screen so long that nothing is pulling me forward through the bulk of the campaign. An enormous amount gets seeded early on, and the payoff takes an age to arrive.
Serviceable, when it could’ve been more
Among the worst things a game can do is wear you down until you’re just going through the motions. Early on, this one avoids that trap. Somewhere around the midpoint, it falls into it. The length simply isn’t justified by rewards this underwhelming.
There’s real depth in the mechanics, and aiming them at the boss encounters is where the game comes alive. The presentation earns praise on its own merits. What it needs is a reason to make me care more.
Cut the excess, sharpen the moments the cinematics are so eager to show off, and this might have been a flawless action RPG for just about anyone. In the state it shipped, it’s perfectly serviceable — and it would be better still if it knew when to leave.
The good: You feel like you’re playing in a samurai action movie, rewarding combat system, boss fights and designs are a highlight.
The bad: Story is way too drawn out for how basic and disjointed it is, combat gets repetitive outside of boss fights, Musashi isn’t that interesting of a character.
Content warning: graphic body horror.