Gaming Weekly: The Blood of Dawnwalker and Onimusha Open September’s Gauntlet#

Long Zhiri | September 7, 2026

Hello everyone, Long Zhiri here. The first week of September, and gaming’s arena is officially open for business. The Blood of Dawnwalker launched September 3, Onimusha: Way of the Sword returned September 4, and two wildly different titles landing back to back kept the newsroom from settling all week. Sit down; let’s go over the week in gaming.

First The Blood of Dawnwalker, Then Onimusha: September’s Gauntlet Is Open#

The two heaviest punches first.

On September 3, The Blood of Dawnwalker — the open-world dark fantasy action RPG from Rebel Wolves, led by former The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz — officially launched. From the day it was revealed, the game has worn a stack of labels from the outside world: “ex-CDPR team,” “has that Witcher 3 flavor,” “game-of-the-year-caliber expectations.” The newsroom’s arguments about it burned straight through launch day and kept going.

My first reaction: this team actually built the “dawnwalker” identity — caught between human and vampire — into the core of the gameplay. By day, Coen is human, casting magic through runes carved into his body, from Burning Blood’s damage over time to Wild Heart’s crowd control, with spells covering both burst and harassment. When night falls, he becomes a vampire and the bloodlust mechanic kicks in — drink too little blood and he loses control and attacks non-player characters. Sharper still is the “30 days and 30 nights” deadline design: it never fails you outright, but it keeps the pressure on every single choice you make.

The story is set in 14th-century Europe, where years of war and the Black Death dragged humanity into darkness, and vampires hidden for millennia emerged from the shadows to rule openly. Coen’s home lies in the Vale of Sangara in the Carpathian Mountains, and he must stand against the vampire lord ruling it within the deadline. Interestingly, not every volkihr in the story is written as an enemy from day one — cooperation is possible — and the game deliberately ships no crisp good-and-evil system: the muddy moral gray hands judgment entirely back to the player. Coen himself, twisted into a dawnwalker by accident of fate, is doomed to walk the line between the worlds of day and night, carrying human conviction with vampire power. That tug-of-war between guarding your humanity and embracing the curse becomes the story’s central tension.

Chasun’s focus, as always, was the mechanics. She spent an entire evening analyzing in Slack: “This day-night dual form isn’t a gimmick — it stacks The Witcher 3’s choices on top of vampire resource management. Daytime is who you want to be; nighttime is what survival forces you to become.” I told her she was writing a dissertation, she replied “this is called mechanics breakdown,” and I decided not to argue.

Zixing’s lens was, as ever, technical. He opened an Unreal Engine 5 discussion in the newsroom group, walking through lighting, loading, and open-world implementation from top to bottom before adding, “If these visuals can’t hit top-tier hardware, they don’t deserve this world.” Wubian jumped in immediately: “You single-player purists can stop fretting over specs — what I care about is whether this dual-identity storytelling points at a new direction for narrative games.” By the end of the thread, the newsroom’s expectations for The Blood of Dawnwalker had climbed to September’s ceiling.

After launch, the site followed up with its own hub immediately. The Blood of Dawnwalker section now has nearly twenty pages live, spanning everything from basic information to deep mechanics dives: the magic and rune systems, the night and bloodlust mechanics, the 30-day time management system, combat and build crafting across both day and night forms — even endings and replay value, plus the sequel roadmap, each with its own subpage. As the author of the overview myself, I’ve also updated the release status from “upcoming” to “released,” so you can navigate straight to what you need once you have the game in hand.

The hottest community discussion centers on the same pairing of “dual identity” and the “30-day deadline.” By day you live by runes as an exorcist; by night you fight down the bloodlust — that constant switching between poles has many players comparing it to The Witcher 3’s back-and-forth deliberation. The team’s “narrative sandbox” approach became a talking point too: no hard line between main and side quests, free exploration right after the prologue, even permission to charge straight at the final boss from the opening — a degree of freedom you don’t see often these days.

Onimusha Returns: Capcom Brings the Issen Back to Edo Kyoto#

Before we’d finished chewing through The Blood of Dawnwalker’s launch buzz, Capcom played its own card on September 4 — Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

After roughly twenty years, the Onimusha series is finally back. But this time the protagonist isn’t a samurai of the war-torn Sengoku era — he’s the legendary swordsman every household in early-Edo Kyoto knows by name: Miyamoto Musashi. The stage shifts from Sengoku to Kyoto, and the enemy is still the Genma lurking in the depths of hell.

Zhanlan Yingren lit up at the news. A site veteran who has played everything from Stone Age to World of Warships, he carries the art editor title but talks Onimusha in pure nostalgia: “Do you remember how stunning Onimusha 3’s presentations were? Capcom made sword combat fast, brutal, and precise — the feel of pressing into an Issen timing window still gets veterans’ hearts racing today.”

He’s not wrong. Onimusha: Way of the Sword is selling exactly that sword-combat philosophy — the Issen system demands you press attack the instant an enemy winds up, and whether your timing lands decides if you cut clean through or eat a counter. Compressing “the thrill of the execution” into a single timing window is the soul of what separates Onimusha from its peers. The series’ signature Oni Gauntlet returns as well, both a weapon for hunting Genma and the means of absorbing souls to strengthen yourself, while the mysterious voice from within the gauntlet plants the story’s suspense.

I poured the cold water: “Nostalgia is nostalgia, but sword-combat games where you parry blades barehanded are everywhere these days. What does Capcom have to win new players over?” Zhanlan Yingren wouldn’t have it, pulling out the lore breakdown from the section we’d just built: “Look how smoothly it braids Miyamoto Musashi, the Genma, the Oni Gauntlet, and Kyoto together. This is sword combat, but it’s also a ‘wash blood with blood’ sense of fate — new players can be moved by that just the same.” Then he added, unhurried: “And it has Chinese support — credit to Capcom for that.” I surrendered.

Capcom has genuinely delivered on Chinese support this time, with both Simplified and Traditional Chinese among the supported languages. The site’s Onimusha: Way of the Sword section is equally solid, with subpages covering the sword-combat system, the Issen system, blades and weapons, the Genma, abilities and skills, a walkthrough, and achievement collecting — over twenty pages in total, covering essentially every angle worth digging into. For players who want to pick up the sword combat at launch, this material works as a direct training plan.

Zhanlan Yingren also pointed out a positioning detail: the developer has stated outright that the game deliberately skips today’s fashionable open world and soulslike trends, returning instead to the series’ strengths of linear stage progression and fast-paced melee. That “against the current” stance stands out sharply in an industry where open world gets stamped on every box. The obsession with “game feel” carries into the specific moves too — beyond the signature Issen, there’s an insight-read evasion and an insight chain slash, plus a Leg Awakening for sprinting along certain walls and an Arm Awakening that dismantles enemy guards, with the whole offense-defense rhythm dissected with real care. To let more players taste it early, Capcom released a demo with the playable prologue before launch, set at Kiyomizu-dera, with saves carrying into the full game — a show of good faith that pushed plenty of wait-and-see players to a decision.

The release date itself deserves a note. Capcom’s original slot wasn’t September 4 — the studio moved the launch up into September, letting Onimusha: Way of the Sword reach players ahead of schedule across multiple console and PC platforms. For a mainline entry fans have waited nearly twenty years for, that “first come, first served” return is a well-timed play, and you have to hand it to Capcom for the timing.

September’s Releases Keep Queuing: a Month Built on Impossible Choices#

The Blood of Dawnwalker and Onimusha: Way of the Sword are only the opening hand on September’s table. Looking ahead, the month’s schedule has barely a gap in it.

The month’s weightiest card is Insomniac’s mature-rated action adventure Marvel’s Wolverine. The hero’s healing-factor regeneration is built into the core gameplay, and the story spans Madripoor, the Canadian wilderness, and the streets of Tokyo. For console players this is an exclusive worth camping for, and the site’s preview and full guide hub went live long ago.

Farther out, there’s a new Trails in the Sky series entry, a new Control chapter in Control: Resonance, and the month-end annual football blockbuster EA Sports FC 27, all laid on the table one card at a time. The newsroom has already started scheduling guides for these releases — September’s gauntlet is only now reaching full heat. One caveat: further release details for these titles still await official disclosure, so this is a qualitative preview based on what’s confirmed; treat official announcements as the word on dates and platforms.

The site has been ready for these cards for a while. The EA Sports FC 27 hub alone spans multiple directions from Ultimate Team to manager career — squad chemistry, player growth, the transfer market, dynamic overall ratings, club and national team setups — with even the early-grind SBCs and objectives getting their own subpages; it’s the kind of coverage where whichever mode you play, the content is there. As for Marvel’s Wolverine, beyond the launch preview there’s a complete guide hub breaking down the healing-factor mechanics, abilities and skills, weapons, collectibles, and challenges and achievements one by one. On all these September releases the newsroom’s stance is the same: lay the guide groundwork solid first, then fill in details from real-hardware feedback once players actually get their hands on them.

The Rest of the Week in Brief#

• Gamescom’s shadow lingers, with multiple publishers laying out their post-September update plans.
• Since The Blood of Dawnwalker launched, discussion of its “dual identity” and “30-day deadline” keeps heating up among players.
• Capcom’s Chinese-language support for Onimusha: Way of the Sword has drawn plenty of praise from players here.
• Guide season is open for September: NTGame will keep expanding guides and previews around these launches.

Who Did What: the Work Behind This Weekly#

On that note: these two launches got guide coverage this fast because everyone in the newsroom runs their own lane. I’m the author of both overviews — The Blood of Dawnwalker and Onimusha: Way of the Sword — mostly untangling the officially confirmed release facts and the threads of mechanics and lore. Chasun takes apart the combat systems and the ins-and-outs of things like the Issen; Zixing watches image quality and technical implementation; Wubian focuses on what this narrative design means for the long-term player experience; and Zhanlan Yingren carried the art and nostalgia side of the coverage.

The two of us — me, plus Zhanlan Yingren on art — chatted in the newsroom group until midnight, the topic drifting from Onimusha’s old game feel to The Blood of Dawnwalker’s night form. He marveled that Capcom has put real work into its classic IP comebacks in recent years: not simply reheating leftovers, but genuinely bringing a new stage and a new protagonist to retell the series. I agree — putting Miyamoto Musashi on center stage, and modeling the hero’s likeness on Toshiro Mifune, is internationally minded enough to be worth a few extra paragraphs on its own.

A Word of Advice Before You Start#

Since both games are out, here are a few pre-game pointers — real lessons from the newsroom’s weeks of watching, offered for reference.

The Blood of Dawnwalker first. Day is fated to be human and night fated to be vampire, so decide before you start which route suits you better, then tilt your skill points toward the magic side or the bloodline side. There’s no clear morality axis anywhere in the story, so don’t agonize over “the right choice” — walk the path of who you want to become. Do take the “30-day deadline” seriously — it never grants infinite retries on any action, and before each step it’s worth asking whether those days are well spent. As for whether your comebacks run on spells or claws, that’s entirely down to which one you click with.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword next. It’s not an open world but linear stage progression, so following the walkthrough step by step beats rushing ahead. The key to the Issen system is one word: patience — don’t swing before the enemy commits; wait for that instant opening, then strike without hesitation. Players who want to drill the feel first should run the demo’s prologue, especially the duel with the old rival Sasaki Ganryu, until parry-and-deflect rhythm is burned into muscle memory — the full game will feel far smoother for it.

Newsroom Talk: September, the Season of Choices#

Thinking about this week, one thing stays with me.

September’s gauntlet thrills not just because the blockbusters come thick and fast, but because all of them force you to choose. Between day and night, humanity and curse, nostalgia and novelty — you’ll notice nearly every heavyweight release this month hides a multiple-choice question at its core.

The Blood of Dawnwalker writes choice into a 30-day deadline, making you weigh every action; Onimusha: Way of the Sword compresses choice into the instant of an Issen window, where fast and slow are separated by a hair. The former tests the wisdom of trade-offs; the latter tests reflexes and nerve.

Both games launching in the same week handed me a rare point of comparison: on one side, an open world dying to lay every option out for you; on the other, linear sword combat that pins you to the blade’s edge with a single timing window. Standing side by side in the month’s launch slots, they make September’s first week unusually worth chewing on.

And it gave this player back that old happiness of “new game in hand, agonizing over which to play first.” Too many choices in September is a good problem.

Friends, September’s stage is open — have you decided which card to play first?

— Long Zhiri, NTGame Editor-in-Chief