2001’s Oni is something I've always wanted to play, a game that's always been in the back of my mind saying to me “what are you doing, you weird ocean creature- play me already.” You know how it is; you set out to do something, then don't do it for like 7 months or so. Because you see, this was supposed to be the second game I was going to review here on RGT. I got as far as starting a file for it, and writing a single jot note line of work; “-joke about her weird hair.”
You may be asking yourself “what do you mean, you weird ocean creature? Why did you wait 7 months? Give me the Oni review, damn you.” My answer, other than that I think you should simmer down a little bit there, weird land person, is that I don't really know. It's just one of those Octopus things. I did my first review on Might and Magic 6, then had big plans of playing this game I've always wanted to play, then just didn't do it. The Marvel retrospective series was birthed in the darkest recesses of my mind like the gnawing parasite of an elder thing while I was brainstorming other articles to do after my first one, while I was also still writing that initial MM6 review, as that's just how I roll. I guess that idea kind of just took over, then I just randomly decided to do an incredibly long article on the Capcom Dungeons and Dragons games on whim after that and, well, here we are a while later.
I've always wanted to play Bungie’s cult classic. It had me intrigued just upon seeing the cover of the PS2 version all those years ago in a game store. I thought the Oni lady’s guns were cool, and I also thought the Oni lady was really cool, too, but for much different reasons than why I thought her guns were cool.
The usual stuff always got in the way of me playing this. No one I knew had it, and every time I strutted into said game store, my kid allowance in my cargo shorts pocket making me feel like I had all the money in the world, I just never got it. I remember I almost did buy it once but then I saw the PS2 port of MvC2 almost right next to it on the shelf, and yeah that kind of stole my allowance away from Oni. Can you blame me? Seeing a physical copy of MvC2, let alone the PS2 one, was like finding a unicorn with a pot of gold hanging off of its horn.
I’m a simp for girls with early 3D polygon textures and discount Wolverine haircuts, what can I say. There, I talked about the hair, past Octopus.
The History
The game was developed by a subdivision of Bungie, Bungie West. By 1997, Bungie had hit it pretty big. They had put out the Marathon trilogy over the last few years which blew sales expectations out of the water, and had started the now entirely forgotten RTS series Myth with its first game, The Fallen Lords. Money had started coming in to say the least, and in enough quantity to let the studio open Bungie West, located in sunny California. The sub-studio quickly got to work on their new IP idea, being of course Oni. What was the main OG Bungie doing at this time? Just a tiny little game called Halo: Combat Evolved. Maybe you've heard of it.
Eh, it was an alright game. Shame it didn’t catch on and literally define an entire genre for the next decade and a half or so.
Oni was an idea put forth by Bungie West’s two initial employees, Brent Pease and Michael Evans. Where did the name come from? It was allegedly a working title originally, coming from the games largest and most obvious inspiration, the anime Ghost in the Shell; ‘oni’ can be interpreted as meaning ‘ghost’. Over time, the team kept the name.
It had a relatively troubled development. It was first revealed way back in 1999, and despite promises that it would release that same year it obviously did not. The team was allegedly still trying to work things out, even at this late stage; main character Konoko was still sort of up in the air, with the first story passes seeing her as a cyborg, much like a certain character from a certain anime called ‘invisible creatures located within hard outer casings’ that's already been name dropped.
The game was also very much marketed with having a multiplayer component in the form of a deathmatch type mode, playable both over ancient late 90’s Internet connection or LAN. This was a particularly anticipated part of the game going off of the reception the game was getting at trade shows, and, I assume you know where I'm going with this already, it was cut before release. Allegedly they couldn't get the netcode to work and tame the latency to a playable level, which I'm a little surprised by given how plenty of other PC games were able to do it well enough even in the very late 90s. It's also a little confusing as to why they couldn't still include the LAN mode, but apparently even that had latency issues.
It also had some sick ads, by the way.
A big wrench was dropped into the works when Bungie was purchased by Microsoft in 2000. This caused two things to happen; Take-Two became the main holders of the new IP, because IP laws are weird; and this also meant that the employees of Bungie West were to relocate to Microsoft's offices, or they would be leaving the company. An agreement was made that they would finish their now contractually obligated development of Oni for Take-Two, then be dissolved back into Bungie; Oni was their only game. All of this is to say that the game was rushed to completion in what time they had left. This tiny little mess created what would be an incredibly stylish and ambitious action game, albeit one with some rough edges. The same year, a PS2 version was released by Rockstar Canada handling the porting work which means the PS2 version is technically a Canadian product. You're welcome, rest of the world. This is of course the version I'd first see and become interested in, and now here I am writing a lot of words about it.
The game wasn’t blasted critically, but it didn’t really set the gaming world on fire upon release despite its trade show hype. It had some divisive takes across plenty of contemporary reviewers; GameSpy gave it an 80% for example, but then Electronic Gaming Monthly gave it a very specific 3.33/10. EGM hated it, but the esteemed Cincinnati Enquirer gave it an 88%, so take that what you will; also, why the **** was the Cincinatti Enquirer reviewing this? There were a lot of complaints about the missing multiplayer, which is fairly reasonable given it was a major part of the marketing beforehand, as well as about some general gameplay and story complaints and a whole lot of people couldn’t get past the combats jank (more on that of course). It’s currently sitting at a 73% average on Metacritic, which isn’t by any means bad. Is it a fair score? Read on…
Give Us the Review Already, You Weird Ocean Creature
For the purpose of this review, I am going to be playing the PC version. This is the original version most in line with the ambitious vision of Bungie West, so I figured I'd judge that as the baseline. Specifically, I’m playing the fanmade ‘Anniversary Edition’ which is bundled with a variety of technical fixes and a couple mods; some texture upscaling, improved framework to avoid a few crashes from the vanilla game, and support for anything above 800x600 resolution. If you’re attempting to play the game on anything above WindowsXP, then this fan version is almost mandatory if you want the game to behave correctly and also be able to capture video and stills from it, like me. It mostly worked, as I still wasn’t able to get entirely full resolution without the game window being off-center, but got something close enough for my purposes that thankfully kept the window where it should be. It also kept repeatedly demanding that my PC use integrated graphics over my NVIDIA card, for some reason, but after the third time manually overriding this Oni finally listened and all was good in the hood.
In researching and getting this Anniversary Edition (head on over to OniGalore), I also uncovered that this game has a rather dedicated and active ‘total conversion’ modding fanbase. I found completely new playable characters, complete redone textures, levels and a **** ton of other cool things. Finding a centralized location of all these mods wasn’t the easiest task, but I found a good amount on this fan site here.
The Devil Spin Kick in all its glory.
In Oni, you play as Konoko, an agent for the TCTF (Technical Crimes Task Force). The game takes place in a dystopian future, one seeing large parts of Earth inhospitable due to high levels of pollution. Konoko is essentially a cop, one fresh out of training and working with a variety of secondary characters over ‘neural link’ contact. She's got her cool cop battle uniform on (though she does pull a variety of outfit changes throughout the game), the standard issue cop Glock; you know the deal. Her first mission is to investigate the break off of contact with an agent undercover in a crime syndicate. The story of this game, like much of its anime inspirations, is a wild ride of character relationships and twist reveals and insane computerized brains and convoluted associations. You investigate some organized crime, deliver sweet chin music to a lot of goon henchmen, defend TCTF headquarters, blow up some planes, paraglide, uncover secrets about a lot of stuff and specifically Konoko, fight the previously mentioned insane computer brain, and go through the usual tropes of the super cop character; you do in fact get told at one point “you’re off the case Konoko!” in some different words.
You’re a loose cannon, Konoko! Hand over your cyberpunk badge and get a haircut!
It's a mostly good story, but you can tell it was probably the most rushed aspect of the game. There's a few revelations that don't really go anywhere, and Konoko herself is very light in characterization. Its storytelling is also very light in general, but what’s there is pretty good. It's still an entertaining ride, those complaints aside, and if you’re at all a fan of any of Oni’s inspirations then it’s going to be something right up your alley.
The next thing I need to talk about is the most obvious surface level of Oni; the style. The game is very much inspired by a bunch of anime influences, but the largest one that’s been dropped several times so far already is Ghost in the Shell. This is very evident in the design of Konoko, specifically. I’d say Oni also pays homage to Akira a decent amount with the overall theme and vibe of its dystopian cyberpunk world, and the games concept artist Alex Okita cites his personal artistic inspirations as being both Bubblegum Crisis and Trigun. Those are, I think, the most identifiable inspirations for the general art style of the game, as it’s a little more ‘cartoonish’ than Ghost in the Shell and much more in line with those just mentioned classics of anime.
I cannot stop roundhousing groups of enemies in the face.
The gameplay and controls are, I think, the most ambitious aspect of the game but also where the jank comes in. They’re honestly something I think were ahead of their time a little bit, combining a focus on unarmed, combo based brawling with flowing gunplay, a very half-baked stealth system, dashing power slides, and some wicked sweet cartwheels. It’s something you see a lot nowadays of combining various gameplay levels like this into one cohesive control scheme, but in 2001 I can’t think of a single other game that attempted to do what Oni has here. It’s a little janky at first, given the eclectic nature of what you can do in the game, but once it clicks it’s a hell of a combat system. The one thing I never quite got a full handle on was the blocking; it's done like in Tekken where you automatically block attacks as long as you're not currently moving or hitting a button. It works in a one-on-one fighting game, but I don't think it quite translated well into a 3D open environment brawler like this. You can only block essentially in a rather tight feeling angle in front of you, and even enemies ever so slightly to your side will still get attacks in.
I’m sure it’s a really fun time being a disembodied brain tied to a machine, locked in perpetual unending agony. Not sure why these pansies always complain about it.
The game is also hard as ****, due to the previously mentioned control jank and enemies who can be just as lethal as you. I wish anyone reading this could have seen the look on my face the first time a Syndicate crime member kicked me in the stomach, then suplexed me like this was the Royal Rumble;
This guy right here, he was the first. But there would be so many more.
The controls just take some getting used to, but the enemies make you have to engage each fight tactically throughout the entirety of the game. You can't just go in and start throwing spin kicks and expect to survive for long; you have to duck, weave, flip and smartly use cover to get around enemies with guns, avoid getting surrounded, and generally put some thought into how you approach each fight and engage with the mooks. To me, this difficulty is what makes the game truly come together as without making you have to use everything in your arsenal, I think the game would get far too boring and it would lose that deliciously frantic feeling to the combat. It's mostly never unfair (more on that later), and it adds together to make each fight feel that much more hype.
Octopus Tip; the leg sweep never stops being useful.
While there is shooting, the game focuses more on bareknuckle confrontations. To this end, Konoko is capable of doing some cool ****. She has two primary melee attack buttons being her punch and her kick. You can mix and match these to create a couple of combos, but the real good stuff comes in when combining your punch and kick with the other controls, such as crouching, running, jumping, directional inputs, and so on and so forth. Coolest move? The goddamn Devil Spin Kick that sees Konoko do a multi rotational aerial roundhouse to anyone in her immediate boot range. I’m just saying, Street Fighter’s Ryu has some tatsumaki competition. She also calls out these big moves with a voice clip that's just saturated with reverb, along with the enemies whenever they do their own goofy anime fighting moves, which is the kind of silliness that immediately gets a point from me.
The giant laser cannon is a hell of a fun time, as it should be.
The gunplay is much simpler compared to the melee combat. There’s no fancy maneuvers play around with like gun dives or slow motion bullet time, but there’s some decent gun variety. You’ve got a pistol and an SMG, a rocket launcher, energy sniper rifle, plasma cannon and a few wildcards thrown in for some real carnage. Despite Konoko carrying a verifiable arsenal in the cover art, you can only carry one gun at a time in the actual game; also, none of the weapons she’s holding on the cover exist in the game which is a little disappointing. This is something I kind of actually enjoyed as it creates an interesting element in making you have to scavenge for weapons, adding into that previously talked about ‘tactical’ side of the game. Enemies can also go for dropped weapons on the ground, of course, which again adds to the whole frantic nature of the combat. To this same end is that ammo is relatively scarce; it’s designed more for you to make every shot count and just grab a new gun off the ground from a fresh kill once you're dry than for you to be walking around with 30 odd pounds of spare bullets on you.
I also need to say just how ahead of its time Oni was. This was 2001 and this game had impressively open levels of a surprising length for the time, an encompassing control scheme accounting for a variety of actions, a simple yet deep melee combat system, a light stealth element as you can sneak up on enemies sometimes (again, half-baked), a cinematic homage storyline and even a little bit of platforming sprinkled around. Even the way the weapons work with you only being able to realistically carry one at a time was unique for its time. I'd say Max Payne could maybe compare but then again that also came out an odd 6 months after Oni. That had the open feeling levels and the cinematic storyline at least, but was a far simpler shooter compared to Oni’s flowing mix of melee and gunplay. You have to give the game some serious credit, is what I’m saying here.
Something else ahead of the curve is the HUD of the game, being minimal but showing everything you need to see due to being very well designed. Once again I can’t really name something else in its time that went for this now commonplace minimal HUD look, other than Max Payne.
Normal day in the office for an anime super cop, really.
It’s when all this comes together that Oni really shines. It’s very satisfying to be punching and devil spin kicking terrorists then pulling out your TCTF issued Glock to shoot some shots off, blocking some punches from another lackey, tossing a dude with a guillotine neck throw before doing your crisp backwards cartwheel away from another; once you figure out how to do all that, of course. I think the game is in this sense a predecessor of the ‘stylish action’ genre, not in the way that you're throwing out huge combos but in the player expression way; you have a lot of cool **** you can do, go nuts.
If you get close to full health, you go into a sort of ‘super mode’ that increases your damage and gives you a totally normal particle effect because Konoko is an entirely normal human, of course; there's definitely not a whole backstory there befitting a cyberpunk theme.
I like the game if that’s not been made obvious by now, but I'm always a fair creature so let's get into some complaints.
I will freely admit that Oni took some getting used to, to the point where I almost didn’t want to keep going. The controls and general combat are something the game just throws you into the deep-end with, as by maybe the second level you’re fighting about four dudes at once pretty routinely; by the third level, you're running multiple gauntlets of half a dozen each. Like I stated, I subjectively like the difficulty and the game’s feel after clicking with it but I can entirely see why some people (and reviewers) don’t or won’t share my same personal opinion. Oni can absolutely make you it's ***** in a way John Romero could only dream about. By about the sixteenth time I saw the game over screen on the third level (true story), I almost packed it up. But Oni’s charm and sense of style made me persevere, and then it all came together for me.
Konoko has some top class hand-to-hand combat skills. Also; a killer sense of early 2000’s action fashion. She knows what's up.
The game is also very inconsistent with this difficulty, and kinda just shows how rushed the game was. That third level utterly destroyed me, but then the next three were comparative cakewalks then the sixth level slammed into me with the force of a triple axle flip kick. Then, once I started getting more towards the end, it ****ing destroyed me again. It’s a little uneven. There’s also some utterly unfair sections of the game, luckily few and far between, but still symptoms of the uneven difficulty. That third level where I saw the game over screen sixteen times was exceptionally unfair, seeing a constant battering of enemies coming at you in a multi level office type place (there's a lot of those in the game now that I think about it...) and often with little to no cover to work with once the gun guys start showing up. That is a really common set up in Oni; guns, no cover. **** you. Better learn how to roll and flip around, loser.
You're going to be seeing this type of set-up a lot.
The uneven difficulty spikes wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for this; the game saves on checkpoints scattered across a level, usually around 4 per and that's it. They are frequently really stretched out, meaning that if you die, you're incredibly likely to have to replay two or three arenas over again which is brutal. In that third level example, directly after that office building was an acid vat refinery (no idea what’s going on there) with a whole heaping helping of more gun guys on entirely uncovered catwalks. Both those sections were the same checkpoint. I would manage to survive the brutal office just to die on the open catwalks to laser accurate plasma rifles, then have to repeat the whole thing all over again. Brutal.
My last complaint is the guns. They don’t feel as good as melee combat for one, with aiming them feeling really loose even with a mouse. You don’t have a traditional centered aiming reticle in Oni whenever you pull a gun out, and instead control an aiming laser that you move around the environment sort of like in RE4, only you can move and shoot at the same time. Points for immersion and style, but it’s not the nicest feeling to wrestle with sometimes even with the games generous auto-aim and enemy lock on and makes the gunplay feel floaty and imprecise. There’s also not that many guns, all things considered, at least not of the conventional variety. The game commits a terrible action game sin; there’s no shotgun, despite Konoko clearly carrying one on the cover. Give me a shotgun, damnit. I think a solid shotgun mixed in with the melee system could have been pure gameplay gold. The guns are also just kinda bad generally; the majority of the weirder ones are really wonky and hardly usable in most situations, the SMG is so inaccurate you're spraying and praying at literally four feet away, and the pistol, which should be the workhorse, is accurate but really weak. The plasma rifle is probably the best one given that it hits hard and accurately, and there are some rare power weapons at least. The game is more focused on melee overall, but I think the gunplay should still have been to a higher standard nonetheless.
Conclusions
I think Oni is a great little game, to summarize a lot of writing. It’s a fascinating example of something ahead of its time, but also with some completely fair criticisms and issues; the checkpoint nonsense alone is a rather heavy one. You can really tell the game was rushed to completion, and maybe had loftier ambitions than what a 2001 PC/PS2 could handle. I can see why the game wasn’t consistently well received upon release, but also why it’s endured as a bonafide cult classic; there’s still a modding community for the game, and 24 years of fan modding support is a record that even beats Skyrim. Who knows what the game could have been had it had more cooking time before being rushed out the door, or if Bungie West didn’t have the technical limitations of their era. It's something truly visionary and special, held back by some very rough edges that can drag it down.It’s stylish, frantic, hype as hell, really inspired by Ghost in the Shell to a rather entertaining degree, hard as ****, and I had a hell of a time playing it, even if I did see the game over screen sixteen times in one section. Someone's enjoyment of the game is going to come down to how much you're willing to put up with, and if you're capable of looking past some jank to see the game for what it could be. It's not going to be for everyone, but if you're willing to preserve and get good a little bit (read: a lot) you just may find something that will impress you as much as it did for me.
Until next time, when we take a look at something else. What will it be? I don’t know, weird land person, just relax there a little bit, eh.
Pros
- + Simple but deep combat system.
- + Flowing mix of gunplay and brawling.
- + Pure style points.
- + Ahead of it's time HUD and level design.
Cons
- - What can be a very punishing difficulty curve.
- - Janky controls that can take some getting used to.
- - Terrible checkpoint save system.
8
out of 10
Overall
Oni is something that was truly ahead of it's contemporaries with a lot of elements that are now commonplace, but is also a game with some serious issues and rough edges. It's stylish, frantic, hype as hell and visionary but held back by some rushed development, and player mileage may entirely vary. If you're down with difficult action games and willing to persevere, than Oni may just be the game for you.
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