Oni

If I had a nickel for everytime I played a 90s/early 00s game where a western dev attempted to emulate the style of japanese anime at time and kind of nailing it, then I will have two. For anyone wondering, the first nickel would be found at Monolith's Shogo Mobile armor division. And while shogo mobile armor division was inspired by more operatic shows/manga like appleseed and mobile suit gundam with a tinge of evangelion, bungie's oni on the other hand is direct if not shameless rip off of works like ghost in the shell and jin roh the wolf brigade. Still, the way they manage to tell this story with the sheer amount of world building through npc dialogues and text messages on terminals, the ambition of its story in covering motoko's psychological turmoil + her relationship with her peers especially shinatama, and the overall conflict and relation with the villain, is impressive and ambitious. Of course, like any early 2000s game, parts of its ambition are also its drawbacks, but you cannot faulter them for dreaming big. Like the amount of animation when it comes to its beat em up combat, the variety of moves from different enemy types, the variety of guns and their Shooting and projectile animations when shot (though side note, the game only has two types of ammo, green and red, and variety of weapons depend on what ammo they use), and the overall structures of levels were marvellous. Speaking of levels, it is well known by now that the levels of this game were designed by actual architecture. And while some have used that as a criticism of it being a little slow at points, I do believe it was somewhat a right choice to make. Like, even with more realistic building structures, the game always manage to indicate me on where I needed to go or what i needed to do, it was always smart in trapping me at one piece of the structure at a time, so I would be implored to explore that part before unlocking a terminal or three sometimes or triggering a cutscene to move onto next part of the building, and this also made combat kind of edge on the seat, with me having to by trial and error learn each enemy's location and having to bait or fight them by using some trickery. Not quite hotline miami, as you still have to kung fu their ass for a long time to even kill one of them, but I think the basic strategy you used in the HM duology also works here.
And the amount of movements and combat combos make it even more fun to experiment. Now this is where we come to like a big drawback of the game....its checkpoints. Like, whoever decided those checkpoints should be jailed to a jail cell with no toilet and only a bucket to shat themself in. Becoz oh my god, are the checkpoints terrible. Just fucking terrible. Like enough to kill the vibes at point terrible. You have large locations to explore and given the nature of the combat you will get your ass kicked at points, but that is par for the course. However, it works on auto checkpoints. That means no quicksave. Think of how it was in the first halo game that came around the same point and you get what i mean. But where combat evolved was smart about its checkpoints, this game is not. Like you could at the very end of the stage and an out of nowhere shot or a misstimed jump could mean that you can lose upto 10-15 minutes of hard earned combat and having to do all that shit all over again. That did became a part of frustration for me. So my advice, play this game one checkpoint at a day, otherwise you will definitely feel really frustrated. Especially if at the checkpoint, you were really really low on health, which can mean dying over and over again, or needing to reload the last checkpoint. Though, this game is smart enough to save before boss fights, so atleast that is cool. Anyway, the voice acting is amazing and so is the music. I think I am running out of words here, since stash only seems to have like 800 or so word limit, but i would say, that this game is definitely worth playing, even with rough parts and some jankiness and terrible checkpoints aside, it is worth sticking through.

Good game back at the day but a bit too long, interesting to see bungie’s take on anime based games. Their character art sucks though lol

Sony

tanto potenziale gettato alle ortiche. versione ps2 a tratti pessima e ingiocabile. tempo sprecato

Классная игра