Oni
It wants feet.
I believe this is the first PC-to-PS2 port I’ve covered in this series. As you’ll see, this is an illustrious category of game. If my notes are correct, this is also the first American-developed game in the series. As a representative of America, I’m sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry.
This has got to be one of the ugliest games I’ve played, but I didn’t realize it at first. I thought, sure, blank-walled and empty rooms makes sense for a training area. Then I played the next level and the one after that. It’s all grey, black, and white. On top of that, it looks like the character artists did what I did in the summer of '05: they bought the Scholastic published How to Draw Manga and went to town.
Levels are largely rectangles connected to each other by sliding doors. You enter a room and maybe there’s a guy who runs up to kick you in the face. Maybe the guy has an automatic rifle and gets to unload a clip into you before you can punch him. Maybe there is nothing at all. Rooms aren’t completely empty. They usually have computer terminals that unlock doors so you can go through more rooms.
I was a little excited to get into the game at first because your moveset seemed somewhat varied, but no amount of variety is going to make this game feel good. I’ll admit I’m playing in an emulator so maybe I should’ve adjusted the deadzones and sensitivity on the analog sticks, but here’s the thing, there’s no lock-on. So many of my encounters involved skating in circles around my opponent or jump kicking at an angle away from them. Also, if you want to run, you have to double tap the analog stick forward. It feels bad and I don’t like feeling bad.
The frustration hit its climax when I faced the Deadly Brain. It is a HAL-3000 computer tower in the middle of the room. In each cardinal direction, there’s a computer terminal that you have to access in order to hack into it or something. While you try to do this, lasers spin around the room like spokes on a wheel. If you hit a laser, machine guns and rockets start pummeling you into submission. I would run to a terminal but go one step over and trigger the onslaught, or I would fail the double tap and only commit to a light jog towards the next terminal before being washed over in a shower of light effects. After dying a dozen times, I knew I could not give up, so I tapped into an old skill. I turned the camera straight onto the path I wanted to go, I counted, and I double tapped* the stick forward with all my might.
I won and immediately deleted the iso. I exorcised the ghost from its shell.