Oniken Unstoppable Edition Review
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Oniken
- Developer: JoyMasher
- Publisher: Digerati
- Switch, PS4, PC, Xbox One
With so many retro-inspired titles out there, terms like “8-bit” or “NES style” have become muddled. Few of them attempt to match the limitations of the era’s hardware, more often using it as a shorthand for games with pixel art or bad CRT filters. Oniken definitely still has that bad CRT filter, but makes a serious effort to recapture the era’s spirit, in both art direction and combat flow. At the same time its enthusiasm for the hardcore philosophy now associated with the era blinds it to problems that undercut the overall experience.
Oniken is stiff. Moment to moment play channels the NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy. There isn’t much variety in terms of subweapons, with only grenades available, but it carries the acrobatic swordplay and elaborate cutscenes over. It generally works well, aside from the requirement to hold up and press the attack button to use sub-weapons. Seriously, there are 20 buttons on a controller, and you’ve only used two of them. I can handle having to press another one. Otherwise, the controls are smooth, even if the high character gravity took me a bit to calibrate myself to.
The bigger problem is in the stage and enemy design. Stages rely on waiting for enemy patterns to finish or platforms to line up, which might work fine if enemies didn’t take so much damage. Most fodder enemies take at least two hits, and common soldiers have a delayed death animation that makes them seem as if they died a second after you cut them. Larger enemies take even more hits, including the annoying flying ones that appear from stage 1.
Fodder enemies generally set the pace of the game, and the way they’re set up here made me feel like my character was wielding a blunt sword. Enemy patterns are varied, but don’t ever feel like they work well together. They move back and forth, bounce at weird angles or just sit there are fire. Later enemies are more interesting, but generally when more enemies appear they tend to make it more chaotic, rather than create a unique problems. Combined with how resilient some enemies are, this leads to a start and stop rhythm, and makes Oniken’s combat more about not making mistakes under pressure than reading situations and responding with smart moves.
The pressure Oniken puts out is intense, too. It thankfully doesn’t use limited continues or expect you to complete it in a single run, but it does have limited lives, and sparse checkpoints. A stage can be over in a few minutes when internalized, but personally it took me a hour or more to get to that point, the time spent getting longer each time.
The poor checkpoints aggravate this, dragging out earlier parts of a stage while giving me less time to practice the later parts, leading to frustration when I did fail before making it to the second half. This is exasperated even more by powerup system, which increases the damage and range of your sword, and allows you to go into a rage mode to inflict even more damage, but loses a level whenever you get hit. This is crucial for bosses, since they tend to drag on even longer without it thanks to their large health bars. So good play makes it possible to blaze through a stage, but the learning required to get that point becomes an extended chore. The only way to mitigate this is to suffer through and memorize the stage.
Internalizing a stage can sometimes be rewarding, but here I never felt that I was mastering a space, but instead memorizing patterns through sheer repetition. I never rethought my approach, never acted organically to a threat. I just did the stage over and over until my body memorized it.
Oniken lacks the sense for level design and enemy encounters that its inspirations have. There’s little dynamism or energy to it. It hasn’t taken the time to be critical of the era that inspired it, to take a look at what made the best of them work and truly reverse engineer it. Instead it’s content to simply imitate it. That’s enough for a lot of people, but if a game is going to invoke the era, I want it to stand shoulder to shoulder with it, not just remind me of better games. It’s a shame, because Oniken has plenty of cool moments and staging, and if it wasn’t so frustrating to get to them it might be worth recommending on style alone.
A final note: as of writing the Switch port I’m playing is one of the worst ways to experience Oniken. It’s controls are awkwardly mapped, it stretches the original from its 4:3 aspect ratio to widescreen, and the scanline filter and controls can’t be changed like in the original PC version.