Feel super conflicted on this one, there's a fair bit to love here with a really cool Street Fighter inspired combat system, lots of enemies to learn the ins and outs of, and a decent arsenal that can offer some pretty gnarly combos with your melee punches and kicks. On a replay, this rating would probably improve as I continue to get better and improve, but here? Now? Distant checkpoints and a pretty limited supply of healing items makes a few levels an absolute chore.
I find the style of "death by a thousand cuts" health management extremely unfun, and although it was cool collecting as many of those heals as I could across the stage, the fact it restores a measly ~20% of your healthbar meant I was rationing them. Which is a shame, because there's a mechanic where if you overcharge your healthpool, you get a Super Saiyan-like mode where you hit really hard and have some overhealth, but very rarely did I ever have the opportunity to even activate it.
Graphically, it's a game from 2001 that looks not the best of the era, but there's some neat foibles (the glass shattering effects and general environmental destruction being chief among them). The two (intro and final cutscene) anime segments are really cool, and cutscenes across the game use JRPG-style portraits of the characters in different emotions which is a nice touch (in lieu of how little emotion the models themselves can portray).
The story? It's there. Extremely tropey, very predictable, and very hammy which strangely makes it enjoyable enough? The ending caught me off guard with how sudden and miserable it was, but it serves its role in the story well enough.
There's nothing particularly innovative in Oni, but what it tries to do it performs decently well enough. The anime-inspired action is definitely a big draw, and if you have a PC copy, I'd recommend the community-made Anniversary Edition which has a few mods that add some Quality of Life and plenty of fixes for modern hardware, plus a mod loader for plenty more Oni action!
6/10 - Ok, ok, don't frog blast the vent core!
I find the style of "death by a thousand cuts" health management extremely unfun, and although it was cool collecting as many of those heals as I could across the stage, the fact it restores a measly ~20% of your healthbar meant I was rationing them. Which is a shame, because there's a mechanic where if you overcharge your healthpool, you get a Super Saiyan-like mode where you hit really hard and have some overhealth, but very rarely did I ever have the opportunity to even activate it.
Graphically, it's a game from 2001 that looks not the best of the era, but there's some neat foibles (the glass shattering effects and general environmental destruction being chief among them). The two (intro and final cutscene) anime segments are really cool, and cutscenes across the game use JRPG-style portraits of the characters in different emotions which is a nice touch (in lieu of how little emotion the models themselves can portray).
The story? It's there. Extremely tropey, very predictable, and very hammy which strangely makes it enjoyable enough? The ending caught me off guard with how sudden and miserable it was, but it serves its role in the story well enough.
There's nothing particularly innovative in Oni, but what it tries to do it performs decently well enough. The anime-inspired action is definitely a big draw, and if you have a PC copy, I'd recommend the community-made Anniversary Edition which has a few mods that add some Quality of Life and plenty of fixes for modern hardware, plus a mod loader for plenty more Oni action!
6/10 - Ok, ok, don't frog blast the vent core!
The control scheme, even after changing it to something I thought was better, is very clunky and on mission 2 the game didn't seem to continue after the opening. Either I was missing something or I wasn't, but it's removed from the backlog for now.
This is what anime will look lik e in 2001
i like the visual idea, being an anime style, but i just cannot put myself through the gameplay and boring ass level design.
i like the visual idea, being an anime style, but i just cannot put myself through the gameplay and boring ass level design.
Came back to this game out of curiosity, a lot better than I remember it being, glad I came back to this. Only real criticism I have is the level design can look bland and some late game shenanigans.
Nobody... My 37 year old community college teachers, "Hey you kids watching Japanimation? Awesome"
The game is obviously unfinished and lacks balancing and proper story.
The combat, which is supposed to be the main focus of the game is quite difficult even on "Normal" difficulty, and even though I managed to fight most enemies in close combat without losing much health, the enemies with the guns are very unfair. Sure, you can knock it out, but when there are many of them, you can't sneak past and have to fight them all, they just shred you to pieces, since it takes a long time to kill even one enemy. The player can try using the guns, but will always get damaged and when trying to dodge and shoot one enemy, all others shoot you with high precision. The combo system is interesting and creative, but to me, it seems like enemies are too tanky, and can even handle their necks being snapped.
The story is nothing special either, just a generic plot with predicable twists. The art is mediocre at most, except the cover image, all characters aren't that well made.
This is another relic of the past that may have seemed to be okay when released, has some interesting ideas, but should be properly remade in order to be enjoyed in the current year.
The combat, which is supposed to be the main focus of the game is quite difficult even on "Normal" difficulty, and even though I managed to fight most enemies in close combat without losing much health, the enemies with the guns are very unfair. Sure, you can knock it out, but when there are many of them, you can't sneak past and have to fight them all, they just shred you to pieces, since it takes a long time to kill even one enemy. The player can try using the guns, but will always get damaged and when trying to dodge and shoot one enemy, all others shoot you with high precision. The combo system is interesting and creative, but to me, it seems like enemies are too tanky, and can even handle their necks being snapped.
The story is nothing special either, just a generic plot with predicable twists. The art is mediocre at most, except the cover image, all characters aren't that well made.
This is another relic of the past that may have seemed to be okay when released, has some interesting ideas, but should be properly remade in order to be enjoyed in the current year.
The controls are probably the worst thing about this game... why did they even make it like that?
I played this a lot back in the day with my brother! Fun memories.
I almost thought I was playing a ghost in a shell game lmfao
Very good for a 2001 game.
The best Ghost in the Shell game we're ever gonna get.
chronicles of mitoka kusonagi (no relation to anything)
que poronga es esto
Has some of my favourite combat in any game but the level design is lackluster, would be a total blast if the environments didn't suck
If you play the PC version, download the Anniversary Edition. It fixes some bugs and also serves as a mod manager: https://wiki.oni2.net/Anniversary_Edition
___
Maybe best to approach this with a certain greybox appreciation. I don’t think there’s any level here that totally works, no vertical slice akin to "The Silent Cartographer," but there are a lot of cool ideas. Stuff like being able to slide over items to pick them up, thereby skipping a lengthy animation, or being able to go into an overcharge mode where your attack and defense are increased, are the kinds of nuances that an action game thrives on- encouraging you to play well, and, more importantly, to play stylishly.
It’s rare when it all comes together though, and aside from the obvious signs of a rough development, such as the barren levels and disjointed story, (inadvertently being the best tribute to anime and manga of the time, like we’re playing through the only translated portion of some massive series), I don’t know if the combat ever finds a real identity for itself. A lot of the encounters can feel sporadic, fighting an enemy every few minutes or so, in kind of awkward bouts that get very grab-heavy, often spending more time waiting for them to get up than actually fighting them. Feels like the sweet spot is two or three enemies, enough that you’re forced to manage the group with a few well-timed hits, but not so many that you can’t get any moves out. The potential for melee combat is also complicated by its interplay with ranged weapons- which is to say, guns render the melee combat nonexistent.
Well, it’s not entirely true, there are some great looking disarming animations, and because of the arsenal seeming to have been balanced around the axed multiplayer mode, you’re mainly avoiding weird projectile weapons that practically demand you to weave between shots to knock out the shooter. But when you get a gun, especially the power-weapons that litter the endgame, enemies have little in the way of a response, so the last few levels devolve into backpedaling around, firing away as Syndicate goons blithely run toward you.
(Wondering if it’s a problem of the style as much as anything else, the spartan environments and pragmatism of combat clashing with a game that’s trying to evoke Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix. Now I'm thinking reception to the gameplay might’ve been warmer if the game adopted a different aesthetic.)
After beating the game, I replayed some of the older levels to make sure my problems weren’t just a failure to understand it- and there was an appreciable sense of having improved. Had a surplus of health, armor, and weapons to mess around with, and was more consistently pulling off some of the moves that had given me trouble earlier, but it never gelled. There was always a bit of tension on its most basic level, gunplay invalidating much of the promise of the melee combat, and melee combat itself often failing to find value in your massive move list, boiling down to rolling around and trying to find a window of oppurtunity to pull off one of your high-damage grabs.
So I’m not hugely surprised that the game never got a sequel, but I am surprised some of its best ideas never caught on. The few occasions where everything clicked- where I’d slide into a guy, grab his gun, and then floor his buddy with a well-placed sidekick- they felt like Bungie tapping into some of the core appeals of the character-action genre years before anyone else. There’s something great yet to be made with the foundations of the gameplay here, just don’t know quite what it is.
___
Maybe best to approach this with a certain greybox appreciation. I don’t think there’s any level here that totally works, no vertical slice akin to "The Silent Cartographer," but there are a lot of cool ideas. Stuff like being able to slide over items to pick them up, thereby skipping a lengthy animation, or being able to go into an overcharge mode where your attack and defense are increased, are the kinds of nuances that an action game thrives on- encouraging you to play well, and, more importantly, to play stylishly.
It’s rare when it all comes together though, and aside from the obvious signs of a rough development, such as the barren levels and disjointed story, (inadvertently being the best tribute to anime and manga of the time, like we’re playing through the only translated portion of some massive series), I don’t know if the combat ever finds a real identity for itself. A lot of the encounters can feel sporadic, fighting an enemy every few minutes or so, in kind of awkward bouts that get very grab-heavy, often spending more time waiting for them to get up than actually fighting them. Feels like the sweet spot is two or three enemies, enough that you’re forced to manage the group with a few well-timed hits, but not so many that you can’t get any moves out. The potential for melee combat is also complicated by its interplay with ranged weapons- which is to say, guns render the melee combat nonexistent.
Well, it’s not entirely true, there are some great looking disarming animations, and because of the arsenal seeming to have been balanced around the axed multiplayer mode, you’re mainly avoiding weird projectile weapons that practically demand you to weave between shots to knock out the shooter. But when you get a gun, especially the power-weapons that litter the endgame, enemies have little in the way of a response, so the last few levels devolve into backpedaling around, firing away as Syndicate goons blithely run toward you.
(Wondering if it’s a problem of the style as much as anything else, the spartan environments and pragmatism of combat clashing with a game that’s trying to evoke Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix. Now I'm thinking reception to the gameplay might’ve been warmer if the game adopted a different aesthetic.)
After beating the game, I replayed some of the older levels to make sure my problems weren’t just a failure to understand it- and there was an appreciable sense of having improved. Had a surplus of health, armor, and weapons to mess around with, and was more consistently pulling off some of the moves that had given me trouble earlier, but it never gelled. There was always a bit of tension on its most basic level, gunplay invalidating much of the promise of the melee combat, and melee combat itself often failing to find value in your massive move list, boiling down to rolling around and trying to find a window of oppurtunity to pull off one of your high-damage grabs.
So I’m not hugely surprised that the game never got a sequel, but I am surprised some of its best ideas never caught on. The few occasions where everything clicked- where I’d slide into a guy, grab his gun, and then floor his buddy with a well-placed sidekick- they felt like Bungie tapping into some of the core appeals of the character-action genre years before anyone else. There’s something great yet to be made with the foundations of the gameplay here, just don’t know quite what it is.
One of the best 3D actions I've ever played! Fantastic game for its time. The picture is top! You can fight, you can shoot, and you can even choose between two endings!
Combat system is actually really damn cool, albeit clunky, but level design is ATROCIOUS. Combine it with extreme difficulty and total lack of checkpoint = you won't have fun at all. Wasted potential, would love to see remake tho
plot is also ass
plot is also ass
This game has the worst controls I've ever encountered. It's mind-boggling to me that this game was made by Bungie at the same time they were working on Halo 1, which has pretty good controls. Also this game's voice acting is kinda grating and the combat feels bad.
its a game i come back to every 2 years, its from my childhood and its just a blast
The game is a third-person action game that combines hand-to-hand combat and gunplay into a single, intense experience. It tells the story of Konoko, an elite agent of the Tech Crimes Task Force, whose tough exterior hides a soul haunted by dark secrets in her past
The game is a third-person action game that combines hand-to-hand combat and gunplay into a single, intense experience. It tells the story of Konoko, an elite agent of the Tech Crimes Task Force, whose tough exterior hides a soul haunted by dark secrets in her past
this game is still better than halo 4 no matter how many loveless chumps wanna comment on my shit and tell me bungie didn’t make halo 4. it shouldn’t matter!
Another one my computer never rendered properly yet I played a bunch of regardless.
ive played this but i dont remember it at all ill have to look this up at some point
Good game back at the day but a bit too long for today’s standards as it drags towards the last couple of chapters, interesting to see bungie’s take on anime based games. Their character art during dialog sucks though lol
This was my first PS2 game and I remember almost nothing about it
Clearly heavily inspired by Ghost in the Shell but surprised to find a really good game. It's a bit clunky and takes a minute to get used to but once you do, it just clicks and I had a ton of fun.
Far from perfect, but there is just something about this game I love to pieces. The way Konoko is drawn differently in every single portrait, like 10 different artists worked on this game, the badass early 2000s electronic score, and the near flawless animation in the combat, this game could have been a true bonafide classic if Devil May Cry had come out during development. All this game is missing was something to take inspiration from and I feel like a style meter would have been huge for Oni.
Very empty, frustrating, often quiet levels and a by-the-numbers action story/characters. That said, I love the combat system to bits and I've replayed this game multiple times just to get into it.
It's hardly the level of a fighting game, or even something like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, but it feels like one of the best translations of the old beat-em-up formula in both combat and difficulty. You constantly feel like you're barely scraping by; every single health pack feels like a blessing and just when you think you're getting the hang of things, the enemies get significantly harder and the spaces between checkpoints feel more and more brutal. I still don't feel particularly good at this game but it's immensely satisfying when you learn to overcome the insane challenges and there's a surprising amount of versatility in how you can beat them.
I also deeply love the clear Otaku influence all over this game. The whole thing is just a big celebration of anime tropes including poor attempts to accurately replicate the traditional manga/anime artstyle and a protagonist that borders on copyright infringement - this could easily have been a licensed Ghost in the Shell game in another timeline.
Flawed as fuck but I really like this a lot despite everything. Has an active modding community!
It's hardly the level of a fighting game, or even something like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, but it feels like one of the best translations of the old beat-em-up formula in both combat and difficulty. You constantly feel like you're barely scraping by; every single health pack feels like a blessing and just when you think you're getting the hang of things, the enemies get significantly harder and the spaces between checkpoints feel more and more brutal. I still don't feel particularly good at this game but it's immensely satisfying when you learn to overcome the insane challenges and there's a surprising amount of versatility in how you can beat them.
I also deeply love the clear Otaku influence all over this game. The whole thing is just a big celebration of anime tropes including poor attempts to accurately replicate the traditional manga/anime artstyle and a protagonist that borders on copyright infringement - this could easily have been a licensed Ghost in the Shell game in another timeline.
Flawed as fuck but I really like this a lot despite everything. Has an active modding community!
Oni was a very hyped anime style game back in the day. This game was made by Bungie before getting into the 3D Grand Theft Autos and other games. This game has a lot of potentials but is flawed in a lot of ways that make the game more boring and frustrating than bad. With that said, the only redeeming quality is the good-looking combat animations and challenge.
Right out of the gate you will notice that the controls are complete upside and backward. All the combat moves are on the shoulder buttons. Why in the world they thought of this is beyond me. You actually don’t really use the face buttons all that much. This makes jumping, fighting, and shooting clumsy and cumbersome and you can’t change the controls to something more natural. These are just some of the worst action/adventure controls I have ever used. The actual combat is fine, but executing these moves is a pain. I felt like I was stumbling over myself because I had to think about the controls. These just aren’t natural! Jumping with R1, L2 and L1 are kick and punch, and you pick up items with R3. What?! I felt like I was trying to solve a Rubix cube, not play a game.
Secondly is the exploration factor. The levels are boring. They all look pretty much the same with flat boring textures and the design is confusing and labyrinthine in some levels. There’s no direction and your compass is useless. The bar gets smaller as you get near an objective, but if you are two flights down it will act like you’re standing right next to it. Enemies are stupid and clumsy, boss fights are frustrating, and the game just can’t compensate its own design with the clumsy controls. I can’t tell you how tired I got after just three levels of finding this colored console to open same colored door over and over again.
The story isn’t really worth sticking around the 14 levels either. The anime cutscenes are nice, but you probably won’t even get through this slog of a game. I tried really hard to keep going, but there was never a change of pace. It didn’t help that there is no mid-level saving and the checkpoint placement is unfair. If you quit in the middle of a level you have to start all over. There are just a lot of annoying things with this game, but even if it was flawless you still have the fact that the game is just boring and not very fun.
When it is all said and done only the hardest core of anime fans will stick around until the end. You really had to have played this when it first came out, then come back for nostalgic purposes. The game is just clumsy and boring but has so much potential if only the developers spent more time on the game. As is stands, I really can’t recommend this to anyone.
Right out of the gate you will notice that the controls are complete upside and backward. All the combat moves are on the shoulder buttons. Why in the world they thought of this is beyond me. You actually don’t really use the face buttons all that much. This makes jumping, fighting, and shooting clumsy and cumbersome and you can’t change the controls to something more natural. These are just some of the worst action/adventure controls I have ever used. The actual combat is fine, but executing these moves is a pain. I felt like I was stumbling over myself because I had to think about the controls. These just aren’t natural! Jumping with R1, L2 and L1 are kick and punch, and you pick up items with R3. What?! I felt like I was trying to solve a Rubix cube, not play a game.
Secondly is the exploration factor. The levels are boring. They all look pretty much the same with flat boring textures and the design is confusing and labyrinthine in some levels. There’s no direction and your compass is useless. The bar gets smaller as you get near an objective, but if you are two flights down it will act like you’re standing right next to it. Enemies are stupid and clumsy, boss fights are frustrating, and the game just can’t compensate its own design with the clumsy controls. I can’t tell you how tired I got after just three levels of finding this colored console to open same colored door over and over again.
The story isn’t really worth sticking around the 14 levels either. The anime cutscenes are nice, but you probably won’t even get through this slog of a game. I tried really hard to keep going, but there was never a change of pace. It didn’t help that there is no mid-level saving and the checkpoint placement is unfair. If you quit in the middle of a level you have to start all over. There are just a lot of annoying things with this game, but even if it was flawless you still have the fact that the game is just boring and not very fun.
When it is all said and done only the hardest core of anime fans will stick around until the end. You really had to have played this when it first came out, then come back for nostalgic purposes. The game is just clumsy and boring but has so much potential if only the developers spent more time on the game. As is stands, I really can’t recommend this to anyone.
This game is hard, but I love the melee combat so much. This is a third person sci fi action game with the same melee and grappling controls as the Smackdown games, like you do hurricanranas and shit, it rules. Would have loved if they leaned more into the beat 'em up aspects over the ranged combat. Once you get the hang of it though, it's still really fun!
I didn't get very far in this game, I liked everything but the levels. Felt like a slog. The development of the game is a lot more interesting though, with lots of crunch time.