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.
On multiple occasions, the camera would get stuck in a wall or phase through an enemy’s 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’s movements. With this new freedom, I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to locking on to everything again.
An Old Tactic In A New Game
For the early stages of my time with Capcom’s macabre samurai adventure, I clicked the right stick in to lock onto the enemy who stood in front of my sword. It didn’t 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’t until about seven hours into the game that I began to reconsider this tactic.
During the game’s 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’s 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.
Clicking The Lock-On Off Just Clicks
This isn’t 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 “simply [allows] you to manually control the camera or aim spells” and is “useful against giant enemies or 1v2 boss fights.” Someone in the Dark Souls 3 GameFAQs forum asked a similar question nine years ago, explaining that Souls games become “SO much easier if you don’t lock on and just learn to free aim.” And even in Elden Ring’s Steam discussions page, someone decried how sick they’ve grown of the lock-on system two years ago, with user Sockwallet saying that you should “NEVER use lock-on for melee in Souls games, [because] it gets you killed.” Evidently, I never got the memo that locking on was bad.
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’s 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.
Sometimes, though, what’s coming isn’t in front of you, and when you’re locked on, you’d never see that. I learned that the hard way during my fight with those two annoying Jolteon knock-offs. By unlocking, I had much more freedom over the camera, giving me greater awareness of my surroundings.
On top of the freedom, I gained a greater sense of control over the flow of battle and protagonist Miyamoto Musashi’s movements. While locking on let me react to the enemy, employing free aim let me react to the fight as a whole. Instead of the camera dictating who I fought and where I was positioned, I was able to scan the arena, reposition Musashi based on enemy tactics, and make informed combat decisions in response to what was happening around me. I stopped circle-strafing and stood my ground more. I stopped dodging haphazardly and parried more effectively. I stopped letting the camera determine my next target and, instead, thinned the pack based on enemy priority. In essence, I became a combat strategist, analyzing the battlefield and enemy movements to attack and defend at the perfect moments.
A Tactic For One Is A Tactic For All
Ever since my encounter with the Nue Twins, I’ve opted for free aim in almost all combat scenarios. Whether I’m fighting a horde of monsters, two bosses at once, or one big bad, my lock-on is typically off now. I’m enjoying the control and freedom too much to relinquish it to the automation of Onimusha’s lock-on system. I’ve gotten so accustomed to it that, after beating the game in roughly 40 hours, I went back to other action games like Ghost of Yotei and Mortal Shell 2 to see just how effective free aim is. And yep, free aim works! I don’t know why I never considered not locking on before this, but I’m glad to have experimented with it now.
Locking on certainly has its place–don’t get me wrong. The final boss in Onimusha: Way of the Sword is a real piece of s**t and a great example of this. It’s a 1-on-1 duel, locking onto your opponent makes sense here. But even then, toggling the lock-on off during certain segments of the fight–particularly the second phase–provides a better sense of control and freedom, and those two traits are important in action games. I’ll continue to lock on when necessary, but from now on, I’m entering fights with no target in mind, allowing myself to flow like water from one enemy to the next, regardless of what game I’m playing.
