5 samurai movies to watch before playing Onimusha: Way of the Sword

I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to live your life, but if you’re planning to play Onimusha: Way of the Sword on September 3, that gives you one weekend and approximately 120 waking hours to fill with samurai movies before the game’s release. What else are you going to do—not watch so many classic Japanese films that you intuitively know how to walk the path of the blade the moment you pick up a controller as Miyamoto Musashi? Seems like a bad way to live to me.

But okay, benefit of the doubt: Maybe you’re not planning to spend every second of the next week with your eyes peeled open going nuts on the Criterion Channel samurai tag because you have some appropriate gaming plans already established. Perfectly reasonable to devote the hours you could spend watching Akira Kurosawa’s whole oeuvre to playing the remasters of the first two Onimusha games, Onimusha: Warlords and Onimusha 2: Samurai’s Destiny, which are only about 3½ and 8½ hours long, respectively. You might even be able to rush through the first game more quickly than you could watch Seven Samurai!

Otherwise I can’t think of any particularly good excuses. Job? Eh. Cooking? C’mon. Loved ones? The samurai code demands sacrifice for a greater purpose.

Assuming you’re not yet ready to devote yourself wholly to such a singularly focused existence, here’s a small selection of great samurai films you can watch between now and next Friday, each of which I think makes for a particularly good appetizer for Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Lemme tell you why.

Sword of the Stranger

Stream on: Crunchyroll | Buy on: Blu-ray

You’re going to spend a lot of Onimusha parrying viciously fast sword swings, the likes of which have never been animated on film better than they are in Sword of the Stranger. This 2007 anime isn’t as famous as it deserves to be: one of the best samurai films of the last 20 years, it throws a classic “wrong place, wrong time” ronin hero into a plot involving the emperor of the Chinese Ming dynasty. It’s the rare jidaigeki flick to involve foreign characters—both the protagonist and his rival—while still feeling fully centered on the Japanese perspective. The Last Samurai it ain’t.

Really, though, we’re just here for the fights. Studio Bones, known for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, My Hero Academia, and Mob Psycho 100, put in the work here. Despite the name on the video above, I promise there’s even better in the full film.

Yojimbo

Stream on: Criterion Channel | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV

In Toshiro Mifune’s definitive samurai performance, he stars as a cunning ronin playing two rival bands of criminals against each other in a small Japanese village. It’s a classic plot, originating decades earlier in the American pulp crime novel Red Harvest and later remade as the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars, and it rocks in every single form.

The reason to watch Yojimbo specifically, though (other than it being one of the most acclaimed films by one of the most acclaimed directors of all time, nbd) is to see Mifune roll his shoulders, scratch his head, smirk, and furrow his brow. He does so much acting even when he’s not saying a word, delivering a performance that conjures up a vivid character despite how little we know about him. I have no doubt Capcom pored over every microscopic detail of Yojimbo with Mifune in the frame while recreating his face and mannerisms for Way of the Sword.

The Sword of Doom

Stream on: Criterion Channel | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV

Noble, clever, fierce, brave; these are often the qualities of the heroes in samurai films, particularly the ones typically played by Mifune. Sometimes, instead, you get the coward or the trickster. Ryunosuke, in The Sword of Doom, is none of these things. He’s evil incarnate, a psychopathic killer who murders his way through quite possibly the starkest, most nihilistic Japanese film of the 1960s.

Ryunosuke is not an anti-hero, but the cracked mirror image of an honorable samurai. To drive the point home, Mifune even shows up in a small role in Sword of Doom playing a wise, controlled master swordsman. The story here isn’t about Musashi or his rival Sasaki Ganryu, but Ryunosuke has some spiritual similarities to Onimusha’s depiction of Ganryu as a mad, jealous swordsman. Many films in this genre cover the same themes and emotional beats, but none of them look or feel like The Sword of Doom.

Ninja Scroll

Stream on: HiDive | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV

The Onimusha series dips into fantasy and sci-fi as it mixes Japanese folklore with stuff that must’ve started with someone at Capcom saying “this would be sick in a videogame”—like a magical gauntlet that sucks up demon souls to power up a famous samurai warrior. In Onimusha 2, samurai Jubei rides a robot horse and an ancient, magical machine-fish. That blend lends the game series a different flavor than the historical chanbara dramas that, melodramatic bits aside, tend to be fairly grounded.

Iconic early ’90s anime Ninja Scroll, on the other hand, is very much not grounded. It’s graphic and at times outright nasty, but pretty much delivered the all-timer version of ‘a hero with a mysterious past fighting through a roster of increasingly fucked up henchmen on his way to the big bad.’

We’ve got a guy who turns his body to stone, one who can melt into shadows, and another who can reattach his severed body parts—all classic videogame boss behavior. I’d be surprised if more than a handful of developers on Capcom’s Onimusha team haven’t seen Ninja Scroll. If you’re splitting hairs I guess it’s not really a samurai movie, but no samurai I’m aware of can transform into a demon demigod, so I think it’s close enough.

This is the only film on the list you should maybe wait to watch: a new 4K restoration is debuting in theaters in October.

Samurai trilogy: Musashi Miyamoto, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, Duel at Ganryu Island

Stream on: HBO Max, Criterion Channel | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV

Okay, I couldn’t stop at just five movies—I’m cheating a bit, but for this final entry I had to include Toshiro Mifune’s Samurai trilogy, starting with Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto. These 1954-1956 films come from early in Japan’s post-war cinema revival (Godzilla and Seven Samurai were released in 1954 as well), and star Mifune playing the same character he plays in Onimusha: Way of the Sword, one of the country’s most famous historical figures. There have been many, many adaptations of Musashi’s life, but this is the one to watch for the broad strokes of his life, depicted in dreamy, vivid color and even more vivid melodrama.

Compared to the work Kurosawa was directing around the same time, they’re not great films—the sword fights aren’t very convincing and the intertwining romances and tragedies are as unnuanced as they come. Still, they’re a perfect introduction to Musashi’s story, with Mifune in the first film playing him as a wild, untameable ruffian before a Buddhist priest finally pushes him into learning the honorable ways of the samurai. In the second and third he’s a markedly different person, pursuing stronger and stronger opponents before he reaches true enlightenment, choosing mercy over killing and honor over winning at all costs.

The second and third films focus increasingly on Musashi’s rivalry with Sasaki Ganryu, which offers a great introduction to how their dynamic has classically been depicted ahead of Onimusha’s adaptation. Watch the trilogy, and then imagine somewhere in the middle both samurai got their hands on magical gauntlets that turned them into superpowered demon warriors and you’ll be primed for Way of the Sword.