Genre: Action, RPG
Developer: Tokyo RPG Factory
Publisher: Square Enix
Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, PC [reviewd], PS4
Release Date: Aug 22, 2019
Price: 49.99
Oninaki is a JRPG from the folks over at Tokyo RPG Factory that tries to push these deep themes about the meaning of life, death, and reincarnation while letting you Naruto-run across the world mindlessly stabbing monsters from the beyond. It’s a weird game for a number of reasons, but mostly because it’s a game that never really is sure what it wants to be other than basic.
On the surface, you get a pretty basic action-JRPG with fairly simplistic graphics. Nothing here jumps out at you but it’s charming if not all that memorable. Square Enix published this one and I think it looks almost note for note like the 3D Final Fantasy III that was released on the DS. Sure, it looks much nicer in HD with a bunch more polygons, but it carries that same style. The enemy designs are pretty unique and weird, there just aren’t all that many of them, and NPCs share the same body with only a few minor variations in faces. It’s pretty easy to lose track of who is who at times as everyone sort of blends into the background.
Combat is where I think the strongest part of the game lies, even though it wears thin faster than I would have liked. You play as a hero who is sort of chosen to save reality –kinda. The story is a whole mess that I’ll dive into later. Just know who you are doesn’t really matter right now, just what you do. And what you do is slowly hack-and-slash your way through thousands of enemies. Combat is simple as you have an attack, but it’s never you attacking. Oninaki instead lets the combat be done by your Deamon. You are assigned a lost soul that didn’t pass onto their next life and is stuck without their memories but loves to fight because you tell them to.
When you attack, your Deamon attacks like some ghost creature doing the damage. It’s a neat system that got me pretty hooked in the early parts of the game. Instead of upgrading your character, you instead upgrade your Deamon with the skill points you earn doing side-quests and killing tons of enemies. There are a bunch of Deamon you can bind with during the game and can keep four in your party at any given time. Each features their own tech-tree which you can use to unlock new powers and buff their abilities and perks, but your skill points don’t carry across all of them, just the one you are currently fighting with.
Since this isn’t turn-based, all the action happens on the fly. This means understanding your Daemon is essential in dealing with enemies; at least it is in the first few hours of the game. Each Daemon has a bunch of powers to unlock but you can only equip them with four at a time. Outfit your Daemon with the best powers that fit your playstyle and have some fun. There is no mana to worry about as after you use a move the bar automatically fills back up. While this happens you can use another move to keep the action flowing or just use a crappy basic attack that does dick for damage. You get into a sort of rhythm with fights that is a good bit of fun. At least it is early on.
Enemies have clear patterns of attack so it’s not going to take you all that long to figure out the best way to deal with your foes. And while there are a bunch of Daemon to find, you’ll probably only be sticking with two in reality. The dead pirate princess with a gun and crossbow for range, especially with bosses, and the guy with a shield that has a cannon attached to it for heavy tank damage. This is because as the game progresses enemies don’t necessarily get harder, they simply get more plentiful and sport new colors.
Oninaki is a game of limited exploration. There are a number of areas in the world that you can visit, but the game mostly funnels you down a linear path, especially if you ignore the one type of side-quest (take a lost soul to a location so they can peace out) the game offers. You run down a skinny path and the fight a mob of enemies in a large open area. Do this a bunch of times until you get to the next cutscene. Rinse and repeat for fifteen hours. Sure, the locations will change looks and the enemies will change (mostly just palette swaps), but the idea is the same.
In-between these sections are checkpoints that also serve as safe zones and where you can change up the Daemons in your party. There are no items shops or vendors outside the one in the town square that you don’t get access too until deep into the game and probably won’t use. Instead, you’ll be collecting health vials which you can only carry a few of and magic stones that can be used to upgrade your weapons to a limited degree. Oh, and I guess you pick up weapons too, but not a lot until deeper into the game. Look, I’m not going to beat around the bush, Oninaki has a real pacing problem.
But combat and traveling are made a little more interesting thanks to the warp/shift mechanic in the game. You are a Watcher, and as a Watcher, your job is to sort of be like a death detective. The people of this world believe in reincarnation and everything about their world revolves around that idea. When you die you are reborn to live a new life and try to make it better. But not everyone passes on peacefully and if someone has something left undone or something tieing them to the world of the living, like some regret, they will be stuck beyond the veil (think purgatory).
Watchers help guide these people into the next life by figuring out what is holding them and helping them come to peace with death and telling those alive that the next life is peachy. It’s a fantastic concept but is never really developed beyond that idea. Hell, you as a Watcher just sort of falls away about halfway through the game. It’s mostly just an excuse to let you shift into this “darkword” and help people, although you don’t really help people. What it really does is needlessly double the length of the game to justify that $50 and make the last half fairly pointless in terms of combat.
You see, you can be in an area and kill all the monsters and then shift into this other dimension and kill the same monsters with slightly wackier colors. I figured this was important so I would clear an area in the normal world, shift into the dead space and kill everything there. Combat is fun and early on I figured this mattered; It doesn’t. By the time of the midway break, I was so powerful with my two main Daemons that nothing posed a threat to me. Daemons also have a berzerk sort of mode once you gain enough affinity (it doesn’t matter) but I hardly used it because I was so OP that I forgot about it most of the time. I was a murder machine that could kill half a dozen enemies with the press of a button. And bosses weren’t a problem as they were all slow, lumbering beats that I could pick off at range with the pirate princess and bash with shield dude in-between.
What’s worse is that just past the midway point I unlocked a regen ability for my shield tank so that every few seconds I’d get life back no matter what. I think I died all of three times during the game: twice to bosses learning their pattern and once trying out a super weak Deamon late in the game because I didn’t pay attention to my health as I was mindlessly farming XP so I can see what they played like. And health isn’t a concern in general even without the ability as you’ll regen health if you sheath your weapon and just stand totally still. Oninaki is a JRPG-lite. It’s like babies first JRPG in a lot of ways.
But this isn’t a bad thing in general. If you have been away from the JRPG genre, or are new to it but don’t want to deal with the difficulty wall that is a traditional turn-based, Excel spreadsheet heavy JRPG, Oninaki is perfect for you. I’ve been away since Final Fantasy X pissed me right the hell off with its moronic heroes, Project Runway reject fashion, and random encounters. You don’t get any of that here and that can be really nice. Can be for a while at least.
The real problem with Oninaki is twofold: it drags on way too long and the story only gets get more idiotic as it goes. It really does feel like two separate games and stories once the midway point hits. I thought it was all wrapped up pretty well from a narrative angle, setting up a second game down the line, but instead, it just goes off the fucking rails. It’s so crazy that all of the main characters from the first half of the game are gone and never seen or heard from again. Fuck all of you guys and screw building attachment. I’m going to talk about the story but it’s not really a spoiler as it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anyway.
You are Kago, a Watcher with cool Daemons and who can shift beyond the veil to help people pass. It’s cool, it’s simple, it doesn’t matter. As a child, you see a little girl beyond the vail for about a minute. You don’t know about your powers so it’s all weird, but she’s gone before you know what’s up. It’s a setup for a setup of a setup. A bunch of years pass and you are now a Watcher being all moody and a total emo edge-lord. You help people pass but you’re really too cool to care.
You got a dad and sister who are also Watchers but are more caring and junk. They die later and aren’t important to the story even though you spend hours with them. You are part of The Watchers that protect the kingdom by helping people pass. Then a bunch of people just kill themselves, you become a detective and find a cult who want to board some ARK thing, and then that’s ignored for the rest of the game. Then that girl comes back and follows you around in the real world as a butterfly and as a girl in the beyond the veil area. She’s trying to save the villain who really isn’t the villain, but give me a second because this shit is weird.
Seems like the Night Devil (the bad guy if you couldn’t tell) is just randomly killing people because he’s a dick and people are super scared. They still pass on even when murdered so I never got why this mattered since people off themselves anyways all the time and pass on, but whatever. He’s bad and wants too… Wants too… He just wants to kill the girl that’s with you and be evil. The game goes well and you decide to try and save this guy instead of killing because the girls wants you to, all as people killed turn into the monsters you fight, but only sometimes. Bing, bang, boom you have a showdown and kill the bastard.
Then the game should end and we should all go home happy, but this game is $50 so it’s just getting its idiot engines revved up. Turns out you are the chosen one but were also the Night Devil too! You were a kid and were exiled from the kingdom and killed a bunch of people and become evil. Then you died randomly because an NPC stabbed you in the back like a bitch. You were reincarnated because that’s the world you live in, only to be split apart. The good part became Kago the Watcher and the evil part became the Night Devil. Confused yet, because it gets weirder.
When Kago died in the game he was reincarnated in the past as the Night Devil, but without his previous memories. So your new life is living his old life before the split happened (I think). By this point, all your friends and family were killed so it’s essentially a new game and nothing from before matters or mattered since this is a new life. The little butterfly girl is gone but you find out that she was actually your sister trying to save you in the future.
Shit happens and you try to fix the past so the kingdom isn’t destroyed by the fake ruler who killed the old ruler in your timeline. You see, only the chosen can rule (because reasons) and the future ruler killed the bloodline. And it just so happens that your butterfly sister (not the sister you had in the first part of the game and already died) was the old ruler she killed! So I think she died, reincarnated as butterfly girl to help you save yourself so you can go back in time and save her? Kill the same bad guys for the hundredth time and all this time travel hurts my head.
Fast forward to the end and the fake ruler tries to kill your past sister again, but this time you’re there to save her and find out the secret of reincarnation in these endless copy/paste sections that are only there to pad the game and farm XP that you no longer need. It’s so needless that the second half of the game I stopped shifting into the dead space and just started running past all the enemies. This did not hinder my progress in any way.
You find out that this is all some stupid circle of life thing and that reincarnation is meaningless but also not meaningless. The good parts (love, compassion, that feeling you get when you find something good in the Target clearance rack) pass on and get reincarnated, but the bad parts of people (hate, despair, greed, that thing that tells boomers listening to talk radio is good for them) are stored under the castle in a pool of evil that also houses a realm that people also sort of live okay in (because reasons) to feed the Oni who also lives there. Every few thousand years the Oni awakens and destroys some of this reality and yours is the only realm left before the end of days. As long as humans live the Oni will come back until there is nothing.
So you kill the bad guys and figure out that the Oni has been hiding on earth all along too! She was taking the guise of. Wait for it. YOUR SISTER. So this whole time your sister was the great evil Oni and was feeding off the evil people got rid of during reincarnation. For thousands of years apparently. So she creates the Night King(?), dies in the first timeline, comes back as a butterfly girl to help you kill the old you (because reasons), sends you to kill the Oni to save her, but then reveals herself as the Oni so you can then kill her? I mean, she gives you the chance to end the world or fight her, but come on, this bitch is toast.
Look, I’m butchering a lot of this because it’s late and I haven’t slept in days, but it doesn’t make a lot of reasonable sense. It makes some sense if you really invest in it and you wrote a thesis in college about Buddhist reincarnation ideas, but most people are going to be left scratching their heads or pretend they understand it to look smart online. And the writing just isn’t good enough to back up the premise. Still, it was this bat-shit insanity that kept me glued to the computer screen. Sure, I spent half the game just running from checkpoint to checkpoint, but I was mildly invested in the insanity.
Onikani isn’t a good game, but it is an interesting game. One that just wears out its gameplay too soon and still has hours of story left to tell. I’ve never felt like a games script needed an editor more than this one. You could have trimmed hours off of this title and still gotten the point across. Some 15 hours later and I can’t tell you the main cast outside you and your sister. I don’t even know if you were eternal or just your sister, or if she was taken over in the past past past? Look, I’m not going to play it again so if you want to get all up your own ass in the comments feel free. Jokes on you, I don’t read them anyways
At its core, Oninaki is just a middling action JRPG with an interesting story with too much padding so they can justify the $50 price tag. It isn’t going to set the world on fire but if you are looking to a more casual JRPG or just want to get into the genre I can totally recommend this when it’s on sale. If any of that above madness sounded interesting just snag the game and you probably won’t be disappointed.
I hated Oninaki and I loved it too. Maybe I too was split and the good side and evil side got together to write this review. But really none of this matters since if the game dies it can maybe come back as something better. Hopefully half as long, half as expensive, and twice as good.
Oninaki is a pretty looking yet mediocre JRPG experience that overstays its welcome
Final Score: 2.5/5
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