Old Game Tuesday – Oni

Programming Note: I’m looking to make this a regular feature, as I am constantly revisiting older games, and many of those are games that maybe were overlooked for some reason. We’ve also been cleaning quite a bit so I’ve rediscovered a bunch of lost favorites. If anyone has any suggestions (or wants to guest review an ‘older’ game) let me know.

I bought Oni a bit after it was released, although I had been interested in it right off the bat. I think I got it in a two pack with Rune. Anyway, Oni is a third-person action game that focuses on melee combat. There are weapons which can help in a pinch, but the real draw was the martial-arts combat. The design is obviously anime-inspired, what with the purple-haired heroine named Konoko. The game is set in a near-future timeline where a world government is in place, and you are a new agent for the ‘Technological Crimes Task Force’, or TCTF. You progress through missions taking on organized crime and investigating your origins.

What I like about Oni is the melee combat. It’s a pretty simple system of punches and kicks, with some short combos for extra oomph. It’s good enough to produce in me what I call the Lightsaber effect – where I want to use that combat mode exclusively, even though there are perhaps better weapon choices for a given situation. There is a definite visceral thrill to successfully sneaking up on a guard and executing a back-breaker compared to just shooting them from cover.

The game does suffer from some of the same issues as many older games in the genre, namely that many of the levels (while nicely laid out and expansive) are mostly filled with crates. The voice-overs are cheesy (and some overlong, looking at you Shinatama) but the cheesiness fits with the anime style. There’s no multiplayer, though it was tried and dropped. I’ve seen fan sites out there where Oni fans are trying to resurrect it, though. For the most part, the game was a victim of Bungie getting bought by Microsoft, as the development and release of Oni happened right in the middle of that. Sort of got lost in the shuffle.

If you can still find it, Oni is a fun experience that is one of the few games of that era I wanted to experience again. Late Edit: also available for PlayStation 2 and Mac. Almost forgot to mention that.