{"id":87934,"date":"2026-09-26T03:35:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T19:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=87934"},"modified":"2026-09-26T03:35:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T19:35:03","slug":"onimusha-way-of-the-sword-made-me-realize-ive-been-playing-action-games-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=87934","title":{"rendered":"Onimusha: Way Of The Sword Made Me Realize I\u2019ve Been Playing Action Games Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"


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There are a number of fights in Onimusha: Way of the Sword that get on my nerves. Greater Nue. Byakue for the, like, umpteenth time. Sasuke Uchiha–I mean, Sasaki Ganryu. The stupid last boss, who I thought would literally never die. I felled them, one after the other, most times on the first or second try, but it forced me to rethink how I played the game because the greatest enemy of all was actually the fickle camera.<\/p>\n

On multiple occasions, the camera would get stuck in a wall or phase through an enemy\u2019s torso. Seeing where I was and who I was fighting became a battle itself as I fought on the actual battlefield–until I did one simple thing: I stopped locking on to what was in front of me. Suddenly, I felt like a true samurai warrior, my eyes observing the full combat zone as I more accurately predicted and reacted to my enemy\u2019s movements. With this new freedom, I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll ever go back to locking on to everything again.<\/p>\n

An Old Tactic In A New Game<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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“What’s that, Shizuka? You want me to stop locking on?”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For the early stages of my time with Capcom\u2019s macabre samurai adventure, I clicked the right stick in to lock onto the enemy who stood in front of my sword. It didn\u2019t matter the number of enemies that were there; that lock-on was literally always toggled, and I could very easily switch my target from one to the other if necessary. It wasn\u2019t until about seven hours into the game that I began to reconsider this tactic.<\/p>\n

During the game\u2019s 11th story mission, What Lurks in the Shadows, you encounter two Raikou-looking monsters named Nue (Blue) and Nue (Red). You battle one of these quadrupedal beasts earlier in the mission, so you should be familiar with their moveset, but fighting two of them, with their lightning-fast movement, sucks. I died. A lot. It\u2019s frustrating because neither the fight (nor the game itself) is all that challenging, but the camera kept getting in the way, making it difficult to keep one Nue in focus while the other charged me from offscreen. This is where I tried something different. I toggled my lock-on off, and before I knew it, those Nues were no more.<\/p>\n

Clicking The Lock-On Off Just Clicks<\/strong><\/h2>\n

This isn\u2019t a new tactic in action-adventure and action-RPGs. Players have been fighting without lock-on for decades, and Souls players in particular have long discussed the advantages of doing so. A netizen in the Dark Souls subreddit asked two years ago why people hate locking on in the game, and user Gabosh responded that unlocking \u201csimply [allows] you to manually control the camera or aim spells\u201d and is \u201cuseful against giant enemies or 1v2 boss fights.\u201d Someone in the Dark Souls 3 GameFAQs forum asked a similar question nine years ago, explaining that Souls games become \u201cSO much easier if you don’t lock on and just learn to free aim.\u201d And even in Elden Ring\u2019s Steam discussions page, someone decried how sick they\u2019ve grown of the lock-on system two years ago, with user Sockwallet saying that you should \u201cNEVER use lock-on for melee in Souls games, [because] it gets you killed.\u201d Evidently, I never got the memo that locking on was bad.<\/p>\n

But many of these discussions highlighted two things I learned in my own testing: control and freedom. I thought that, as I fought through Onimusha\u2019s hell-transformed world, locking on was the way to go. It squared me up with the enemy in front of me, ensuring that I was always looking ahead at what was coming. <\/p>\n

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