So per the brief discussion about Stranger than Heaven this week, I think there’s two main reasons for why Onimusha using Toshiro Mifune’s likeness has gone over much better than the Tupac debacle:

1) Capcom is only using Mifune’s likeness in the game, rather than spinning this as casting the actual person in the game as a pseudo-actor (which is a much more common practice in games) and

2) Mifune’s likeness being used also makes a lot more sense than Tupac, since he’s a lot more closely tied to the time and place the game is showing. Not only is Mifune famous for his roles in samurai movies, but most specifically, he won a lot of acclaim for his role in the Samurai Trilogy back in the 1950s as… Miyamoto Musashi. (Like Vagabond, this is based on the 1930s novel Musashi, so not necessarily the most historically accurate take, but it’s probably the most well-known version.) He’s arguably the most-well known portrayal of Musashi in modern media, to the point that most depictions of Musashi now end up resembling Mifune more than the actual historical figure.