When you are tearing down mobs in early game, you might mistake Onimusha Way of The Sword for having pretty simple combat – that feeling gets laid to rest pretty soon when you start tackling bosses, and while there may be a couple or so that are less challenging, they are more than averaged out with some tough as nails battles where one or two mistakes can be pretty much it for Musashi.
In this article, I have first put all the main bosses in order, and then put those in a tier list. While preparing the tier list, I have only looked at the very first time you encounter that boss (many get repeated later on as you progress); except, of course, that one boss that keeps re-appearing as part of the main story missions 3 times in the entire game.
Onimusha Way Of The Sword – All Bosses List & Missions
The game throws 16 bosses at you, and most fight pretty differently from each other – there is great variety and challenge with adapting to different movesets, what with some bosses being giant monsters with massive health pools, and others being swift with rapid combos that demand absolutely top line precision levels.
| Boss | Main Mission |
| Sasaki Ganryu | The Stage Is Set At Kiyomizu |
| Daidara | The Stage Is Set At Kiyomizu |
| Rasho-gan | Careful What You Wish For |
| Byakue | The Curse Of Kiyomizu-zaka Slope |
| Ifuu | Windswept Kennin-ji |
| Nue | What Lurks In The Shadows |
| Nue (Blue) & Nue (Red) | What Lurks In The Shadows |
| Greater Nue | What Lurks In The Shadows |
| Dohatsu-ten | The Roots Of All Evil |
| Benkei | Bloodbath On The Bridge |
| Burai | A Tempest At The Temple |
| Sasaki Ganryu – 2 | To Live Is Suffer |
| Shuten Doji | The Demon On The Mount |
| Ifuu & Burai | Storm Chaser |
| Sasaki Ganryu – 3 | In The Light Of An Icy Moon |
| Dokyo | In The Light Of An Icy Moon |
| Minamoto no Yoshitsune | The Way Of The Sword |
Onimusha Way Of The Sword – All Main Bosses Tier List
Let me put up the tier list first, and then I will go about explaining my logic for the all main bosses tier list in Onimusha Way of the Sword. Within each tier as well, the bosses are in order of difficulty. So, for example, Yoshitsune and Sasaki Ganryu-2 both are S Tier, but among the two, Yoshitsune is higher on the list since he was WAY tougher.
| Tier | Bosses |
| S | Minamoto no Yoshitsune Sasaki Ganryu – 2 |
| A | Shuten Doji Greater Nue Ifuu Byakue Burai |
| B | Sasaki Ganryu – 3 Ifuu & Burai Dohatsu-ten Dokyo Benkei Rasho-gan |
| C | Sasaki Ganryu-1 Nue Nue (Blue) & Nue (Red) |
| D | Daidara |
D Tier
Daidara – The fight that gives you early game confidence that this might not be a tough game after all. haha – you were set up by the developers – the easiest fight by a big margin in the game.
C Tier
Sasaki Ganryu – 1 is also almost a D Tier fight when you look at other boss fights – the only reason this will be challenging is because you would still be grappling with the various counter options at your command in the game.
The two Nues are also pretty easily dealt with – the arena is huge, and you can actually cheese the fight by shooting arrows from a distance and avoiding melee combat altogether. Ashamed to admit, that’s what I did in my first try.
B Tier
Rasho-gan is a challenge early on – but once you figure out dropping that house on him, it becomes manageable. Dohatsu-ten and Benkei are skill checks essentially on deflect; and both are easily the more enjoyable fights that I have had in the game. Dohatsu-ten does keep appearing later on in the game, and the fun value of the fight never drops. The Nue fight is also pretty manageable – even if you miss the tail when shooting, you can still shoot the boss to keep doing decent damage.
A Tier
Aah. The ones where you are in probability going to die quite a few times before you have mastered these bosses. Byakue is an irritating fight and continues to be the case even in mid game when you are sufficiently levelled up. Greater Nue has a massive health pool, and the lightning laced attacks in phase two require practice to avoid. The Shuten Doji is another fight that is really well-designed – I had the maximum trouble from all the A Tier bosses in this fight – still, I never felt that the fight was unfair.
The Ifuu & Burai fight combo, however – I have put it in the B Tier – while immensely fun and entertaining, the way you are leveled up and equipped at this stage, made the fight much less of a challenge as compared to when I had to take them early on in the game, one on one.
S Tier
The second time you take on Sasaki Ganryu, lets say he has grown an arm or two. The attacks come at you with lightning speed, to the extent that you are unlikely to get space to chug a potion. Ifuu and Burai, as if they alone were not enough, this one has both of them doing their own stuff in addition to some lethal combos – and a particularly nasty one in phase 2 that is a guaranteed wipeout if you miss the parry.
And then, of course, you have Yoshitsune. 3 phases, killer moves, a boss worthy of the game finale. Enough said.
