Onimusha New Game Plus: What Carries Over

New Game+ in Onimusha: Way of the Sword keeps your skills and consumables but wipes your gear. Revival Mirrors, healing supplies, Charms, skill upgrades and awakened abilities, Hozuki Pouches, Genma Notes and Lion Dogs all come with you; equipment enhancements, Mysteries of Kyoto, Chance Encounters and clothing do not.

That split is the whole story of the second playthrough, because Carnage — the third difficulty, and the one gating the game’s 100% — is only reachable through New Game+. You enter the hardest mode in the game with a full skill tree and a base-tier sword.

One thing to be clear about up front: Capcom has published nothing about New Game+. The itemized list below comes from PowerPyx’s trophy and collectible guides, which are established secondary sources, not first-party statements. Where those guides are silent, this page says so rather than filling the gap.

What carries over, and what resets

Carries over	Resets
Revival Mirrors	Equipment enhancements
Healing supplies	Mysteries of Kyoto (8)
Charms (15)	Chance Encounters (18)
Skill upgrades and awakened abilities	Clothing
Hozuki Pouches (9)
Genma Notes (23)
Lion Dogs (36)

The practical consequence is the one PowerPyx flags: you keep your skills but not your gear tiers, which is why its guide treats Carnage as the hard part of the platinum rather than a victory lap.

Note the ambiguity in that reset column. PowerPyx lists “equipment enhancements” and “clothing” as separate entries, and the game has a clothing enhancement track — clothing upgrades feed Health and Stamina, sword upgrades feed attack, Issen and Oni power, and gauntlet upgrades raise Oni Power capacity and soul absorption range. Whether “clothing” in the reset list means cosmetic outfits or the clothing enhancement track specifically is not established by any source we can verify. Either way, the enhancement tracks themselves go back to zero.

The collectible categories nobody has placed

The game has 274 collectibles across 11 named categories. The carry-over list covers four of them and the reset list covers two. That leaves five categories unaccounted for:

• Oni Armaments (7)
• Power Stones (54)
• Oni Stones (54)
• Fine Silk Cloths (25)
• Tamahagane (25)

No source we can verify states whether these persist into New Game+. Do not assume they do. What we can say is narrower and more useful: Power Stones and Oni Stones are the currencies that unlock and enhance skills, and skill upgrades explicitly carry over — so the effect of stones you already spent survives into the new run. Whether unspent stones or already-collected pickups come with you is a separate question, and it is unanswered.

Tamahagane and Fine Silk Cloths are equipment enhancement materials, which sits awkwardly next to “equipment enhancements reset.” That tension is real and unresolved in the sources.

How Carnage unlocks

Two difficulties are selectable when you start: Story and Action. Carnage is a third difficulty unlocked by completing the game, and it is available exclusively through New Game+. Once you select it, you cannot change difficulty mid-run.

Carnage is mandatory for 100% — it gates the gold trophy True Onimusha — which is why PowerPyx sets a minimum of two playthroughs and estimates 60–70 hours for the platinum across 52 trophies, at a stated difficulty rating of 6.5/10.

One setting decision matters more than any of this. Action Prompts are automatically disabled on Carnage. PowerPyx’s recommendation is to turn them off during your first playthrough so you learn attack timing by reading animations instead of reading a prompt, rather than arriving at Carnage having never done it unassisted. Issen is an attack input — you press attack just before an enemy’s strike lands — and the timing window is razor-thin. Exact frame data for that window circulates widely online but is not verified; treat any published frame count for this game with suspicion.

Finish your collectibles before you start NG+

You do not need New Game+ to clean up collectibles, and starting one before you finish is the avoidable mistake.

There is an explicit point-of-no-return prompt when you begin the final mission at Rendaino, and free roam is available right up to it. After the credits, selecting Continue from the main menu returns you to just before that final mission — which is why PowerPyx rates every trophy recoverable. PowerPyx also recommends keeping a manual save at the point-of-no-return prompt specifically for cleanup.

So the sane order is: finish the story, use Continue to mop up the 274 collectibles and the 18 Chance Encounters on your first-run gear, then start New Game+ for Carnage. Doing it the other way round means re-earning Mysteries of Kyoto and Chance Encounters from scratch on the hardest difficulty with reset equipment.

One more piece of hoarding advice from PowerPyx: hold Oni Stones rather than spending them immediately, until you have unlocked the vision skills that make collectible tracking easier.

About the “true ending grants an ultimate armament” claim

You will see this repeated. No source verified for this page supports it.

PowerPyx’s 52-trophy list contains no ending-choice trophy, no “all endings” trophy and no S-rank-mission trophy, and it sets the two-playthrough minimum solely to reach Carnage. The seven Oni Armaments are ordinary first-playthrough collectibles with known locations — five optional, with only the Oni Bow and Wind-Whipper unmissable on the story path — and finding all seven awards the Oni Armory trophy, not a New Game+ reward.

The wider “three endings” story circulating about this game is worse than unsupported. Two of its three stated requirements are demonstrably wrong: Rasho-gan is described as an optional superboss when it is a Mission 5 story boss, and the “Oni Gauntlet Seal” collectible it depends on does not appear anywhere in the 274-item list. What guides describing the ending do agree on is that there is one campaign ending plus a short post-credits scene, seen without any checklist. Don’t skip the credits.

If a page tells you about Fluorite, puzzle boxes or a Dark Realm in this game, close it — those are mechanics from Onimusha: Warlords (2001) being passed off as current.

Post-game beyond New Game+

The confirmed post-clear content is New Game+, Carnage, the Continue-before-final-mission cleanup route, and a Practice Ground with a Boss Rematch menu containing all 18 bosses, including the enhanced variants — Byakue (Enhanced), Dohatsu-ten (Enhanced), Sasaki Ganryu (Altered) and Benkei (Fully Armed) among them.

How the Practice Ground is unlocked is unconfirmed. A method involving ringing a bell during the story is circulating, but no source we could check states it. It is also unconfirmed whether any Boss Rematch fight has to be cleared on Carnage for a trophy — PowerPyx’s guide does not say so, and you should not plan around it.

Two further gaps worth naming plainly: nothing establishes whether you can start a New Game+ run on Story or Action instead of Carnage, and Capcom has announced no photo mode, season pass or post-launch roadmap.

For the wider picture on the shipped game, see our everything we know page.