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Oni Power Gauge
May 8, 2026 at 08:42 AM
Removed redundant H1 heading from article body
The Oni Power Gauge is the dedicated resource meter that powers Musashi Miyamoto's Oni Armaments in Onimusha: Way of the Sword. It sits on the combat HUD as a separate gauge from health and posture, and it fills as the Oni Gauntlet absorbs blue souls dropped by defeated Genma. Spending the gauge unleashes a cinematic burst attack that sits one tier above the regular katana in raw damage, which makes it the closest thing the game has to a high-commitment burst resource.
The gauge fills exclusively from blue souls, the rarest of the three soul colours that Genma drop on death. Yellow souls restore Musashi's health and red souls feed his upgrade economy; only blue souls flow into the Oni Power Gauge. The relative scarcity of blue drops is what makes the gauge feel earned, because most encounters yield only a handful of blue souls and a player who wants to keep the gauge topped up has to fight the encounters Capcom has dropped them into rather than trying to skip past them.
As with other souls, blue orbs drop physically into the arena and are pulled in by the gauntlet when Musashi moves into their range. Orbs disappear if they sit too long, and nearby Genma can absorb stray ones themselves and flip them back as enemy buffs, so collection is part of the active rhythm of a fight rather than a passive cleanup phase. Spending a few seconds chasing a blue soul that would otherwise be lost is almost always worth it.
Each Oni Armament use consumes a fixed chunk of the gauge. The activation is a single committed input: pressing the dedicated armament trigger commits Musashi into the opening swing of the chosen weapon, and the rest of the sequence plays out as a scripted string. The gauge does not regenerate while the armament is active, and it does not refund any portion of the cost if the armament whiffs. Spending it is a one-shot decision, which forces the player to read a fight before triggering rather than reflexively dumping the gauge into the first available opening.
The gauge does not regenerate on its own. Resting between encounters, hiding from enemies, or running through an empty corridor will not top it up; the only way to fill it is to keep absorbing blue souls, which means the only way to use more armaments is to stay in combat. That feedback loop is intentional and pushes the system toward aggressive play rather than passive resource hoarding.
Hitting enemies with an Oni Armament is one of the most reliable ways to extract yellow souls, the colour that restores Musashi's health when the gauntlet absorbs them. That makes the Oni Power Gauge function as a soft sustain mechanic on top of its raw burst damage: spending the gauge against a dense group can refund a meaningful portion of Musashi's HP through the yellow souls each hit produces. Long encounters often turn on whether the player times an armament well enough to claw back health they spent earlier on parry trades.
The Oni Power Gauge rewards three broad strategies:
Boss punish windows. Bosses occasionally finish a long, telegraphed attack and open a clear recovery gap. Committing the gauge during that window guarantees a chunk of damage on a timer the player can predict, instead of trying to win the same window with the regular katana.
Crowd control on minor Genma. Multi-hit armaments such as Two Celestials sweep through grouped enemies and clear space around Musashi quickly, which is much faster than chipping the same group down through individual sword strings.
Soul-economy maintenance. Spending the gauge on a healthy crowd seeds a wave of yellow souls that the gauntlet can pick up between hits, which keeps Musashi's HP topped up without forcing the player to rely on consumables or wait for a quiet moment.
The Oni Power Gauge is deliberately separated from the rest of Musashi's combat. It does not draw from the same resource as his posture defence or his Issen counters, both of which run on different meters and timing systems. That separation lets the player layer the gauge on top of their normal sword loop rather than trading one for the other.
The gauge is also distinct from the buff meters Musashi can build through clean defence. The flawless-dodge red meter and the chained-parry blue meter both fill from skilled play but reward Musashi by making his existing katana strings stronger, while the Oni Power Gauge unlocks an entirely different attack form. Both systems can be active at the same time, and the cleanest combat ceiling in the game involves keeping a buff meter up while the gauge holds at least one charge for the next opening.
The Oni Power Gauge is the throttle on Musashi's biggest single attack tool. It fills only from blue souls, drains in fixed chunks per Oni Armament use, never regenerates passively, and refunds a meaningful share of its cost back as yellow soul healing. Treating it as a scarce resource to spend on the fights that matter is the difference between a mid-tier run through corrupted Kyoto and a clean one.
