Musashi Moveset, Skills and Combos

The basics

Light and heavy katana strings

Musashi fights primarily with a single katana, and his moveset is a focused set rather than a giant combo list. One-handed attacks are the light strings — quick but relatively weak slashes — while two-handed attacks are the heavy strings with more reach and power.

Every attack Musashi lands depletes the stamina of his foes. Once an enemy's stamina is depleted you can perform a Break Issen, so the basic loop is: attack to wear down stamina, then convert the break into an execution.

Official techniques

The eight named techniques

Capcom's official action pages name eight techniques that make up the full toolkit beyond basic strings. Together they cover defense, ranged play, environment use and clash contests.

The signature

Issen, Break Issen and Chain Issen

The Issen is the Onimusha signature — a perfect-timed counter where the risk and reward live in a single timing window. The Issen counter is your defensive holy grail: miss the window and you are left wide open, land it and you can chain into more.

Break Issen is the stagger finisher: once a foe's stamina is depleted, the execution triggers with a dramatic pause and camera angle, and against bosses it lets you target body parts or strip armor. Chain Issen is the crowd-clearer — press the light attack again as your first Issen lands and the camera locks to the next enemy for a highlighted follow-up kill.

At the extremes the system even lets you Issen projectiles — including, reviewers report, lightning itself.

Beyond the katana

Oni abilities and Oni Armaments

The Oni Gauntlet adds four abilities: Oni Vision reveals what is hidden to human eyes, Oni Strength breaks defenses and barriers, Oni Agility grants wall-running bursts of speed, and Oni Awakening unleashes a full-power form with the Onimusha Onslaught technique.

Three summoned Oni Armaments sit on top, each with a situational read: Two Celestials when you are low and need Yellow Soul sustain, Earth-Shakers against shields, armor and heavy defenses, and Wind-Whipper when surrounded — its vortex also neutralizes incoming projectiles, and near fire it becomes a blaze.

The economy

Soul routing and the Blazing loop

Defeated Genma drop souls in three colors: yellow restores health, red funds permanent upgrades, and blue fills Oni Power for your Armaments. In the full game the loop extends — parries fill the Blazing Gauge, Blazing State boosts damage and blue-soul drops, and releasing Armaments yields purple souls that charge the Oni Awakening gauge.

One modernization matters for the loop: you can absorb souls while moving now, and switching Oni Armaments slows time briefly to ease the pressure — both confirmed by the developers as changes that keep the classic identity intact.

Settings

Aggressive or Defensive: pick your layout

A new game offers two control layouts, and you can swap between them in the options menu at any time. Aggressive keeps combat actions on the face buttons — easy to learn but it clashes with the left-bumper guard habit most players bring from other action games. Defensive puts guard on the left bumper with light and heavy on the face buttons, matching Souls-like muscle memory, which is the layout most guides recommend.