Everything Wrong With Oni (PS2)

Wow, where do I even start with this one? Rockstar Games and Bungie from the erarly aughts seems like a combination that is nothing short of a match made in heaven. Right? Well, for the seminal third-person action-adventure game from the first (and last) time this duo teamed up, this was more like a match made in hell. And I mean that endearingly.

So let’s start at the top, what is Oni? Well, it’s a third-person action-adventure game that released in 2000 for PC and for PS2. Before Halo, Bungie decided to try their hand at something a bit more pedestrian. You can see the seeds of Halo: Combat Evolved in Oni, mostly with the way the story unfolds, the re-use of levels for different story purposes, and the completely out-of-scale environmental architecture where everything is way too large for its intended purposes, which was a common flaw in many games as the advent of 3D design became more prevalent through the mid-to-late 1990s. Oni is one of those games where it has the left-over baggage of the common miscalculated architectural dimensions that was common in so many other games from that era. But the real hook for Oni at the time was the mix of 3D melee combat and third-person shooting.

I guess the last sentence kind of sums up a large part of the appeal of Oni, even though it doesn’t seem terribly remarkable.

These days almost every third-person action title has melee combat and over-the-shoulder shooting; so what makes Oni any different or special in any way?

Well, the game is kind of a precursor to games like S4 League, GunZ: The Duel or the criminally under-rated Wet. But most people will probably compare it to another Rockstar published game that came out a year later from Remedy Entertainment, Max Payne.

The problem is that Oni – on paper – seems like it should be compared to all those other games given how it reads on paper: you play as Konoko, an elite TCTF agent who can run, crawl, slide, jump, flip, roll, kick, punch, and execute various combos. You can grab and throw enemies, eventually unlock special attacks, unlock disarm techniques, and utilize a variety of weapons.

Ironically, the weapons you use throughout the game are in no way representative of the weapons featured in all of the cool interstitial art featured throughout the game. That awesome Benelli shotgun on Konoko’s back in the loading splash screen? Never get it. The giant M60 she has with the bullets strapped around her? Never see one of those in the whole game. The large .357 magnum revolver that you see Konoko wielding frequently in the art? Not in the game.

But all of that is neither here nor there. Weapons advertised that you don’t actually get to use in the game is something that video game marketing have been guilty of for ages. Though that kind of immediately came to an end during the sixth generation, as typically anything that was featured on the box art or in the promotional material usually appeared in the game. It’s not a big deal here because Oni has a cool suite of weapons, though, and it highlights that Bungie was still well ahead of the game when it came to unique and completely original weapons, many of which have not been replicated in any way in any future games. It’s a real shame because there are some really fascinating weapons in Oni but they’re all rendered kind of pointless due to the piss poor combat.

The Combat Sucks

If the main selling point of your third-person, action-adventure shooter is themed around the Matrix-inspired combat acrobatics and shootouts, then you better make sure that the mechanics are rock solid. And in Oni, the combat is anything but rock-solid, and the reason is because the controls suck, but before getting into the controls, we have to talk about why the combat sucks, and that’s because a large part of its issues resides in a broken AI, but it’s also more than that… it’s how the melee and weapon mechanics do not meld well at all.

The problem is that the melee is extremely limited, the weapon aiming is horrible, and even with all of the dodging capabilities, the mechanic implementation for dodging and blocking is horrible. So blocking is done by just standing still, like Tekken. But the problem is that it only works if you are facing the enemy attacking you in that direction. So what happens is that if you aren’t directly facing an enemy and they attack you, then you won’t block. Also, you have to duck to block lower attacks.

Now that doesn’t sound bad, right? Well it is bad because enemies can execute oblique kicks that they can pull out of nowhere, and due to the input latency, there is a delay in reacting. So by the time you see the kick coming, you’re already hit. If you have a bit of precognition about you, you might be able to figure out when those kicks come to block them, but otherwise the enemy can throw them but you can’t. You can perform sweeps by ducking and kicking, but then you have the issue where sometimes when you knock an enemy down they can block your ground attacks while they’re laying face down on the ground because they for some reason get an instant invincible frame after a knock down. Basically, you can only perform a ground attack after they fall but before they get up.

The thing is, you aren’t afforded any kind of invincible frames unless you’re in the middle of a grab move. However, after the grab move is completed, you’re completely vulnerable. In fact, before you can do anything else, you can be attacked or grabbed by the enemy, which means that performing grab moves when surrounded by multiple enemies means you will be punished for it. So this discourages you from fighting multiple opponents or at least performing grab moves while surrounded.

Basically, if you’re fighting multiple enemies, you’ll want to only use grab moves to separate enemies and create space, otherwise you will get owned. This isn’t Fighting Force or Streets of Rage, where it’s easy to clear out enemies and create space to perform a series of other attacks. Instead, engaging in any kind of multi-enemy combat scenario is a recipe for disaster.

“Just use guns!” I can’t hear you say on the other side of the monitor. Well, guns would be a cool alternative if they actually killed enemies in a reasonable manner. But for some enemies it requires an entire magazine, or in some cases, two whole magazines. All the meanwhile they can just keep charging right at you, as there are no stun-frames when shooting bad guys, especially the larger, armored enemies. So you’re woefully punished for fighting enemies head-on.

Now you can attempt to stealth past enemies by crouching, but there are no stealth takedowns, so stealth is pointless because once you start fighting enemies will become alerted anyway. What this results in is basically running around trying to separate enemies and then cheese-spamming a running grab move until they die. So instead of utilizing all those cool flips, spins, cartwheels, and dodge-rolls, you just end up running towards enemies and spamming a grab move until you beat the enemy, assuming they don’t shoot-spam you to death, or you don’t get stuck on geometry, or they counter-attack you with a special. And this fits into another problem….

The Controls Suck

This suffers from late 90s, early aughts 3D game controls. Konoko controls almost like a tank; no where near near as bad as the old Resident Evil games, but she’s terribly stiff. This is because it uses 360-degree rotational actor controls, as opposed to the more typical isometric style or eight-directional controls that games like Fighting Force or Gekido used, which were a bit more forgiving for 3D combat. When you have a rotational control scheme like in Oni, it makes it easier for navigating intricate 3D spaces, but much more difficult for things like precision melee combat.

Now this isn’t to say that combat mechanics with this control scheme can’t work, games like Lords of the Fallen work well with it, but it’s also a game designed around accommodating that kind of control scheme. The combat is slow, tactical, and heavy. However, Oni tries to have fast-paced combat, but it just doesn’t work unless you’re fighting one enemy at a time.

Due to the tank-like controls, trying to fight two enemies who are not directly in front of you results in just getting clobbered, since you can’t attack and counter or attack and block immediately. If you’re throwing a combo at one enemy, and someone else is attacking you, you will simply get clobbered. What the game should have had is a dedicated block button like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, then you could at least throw a combo or two and then block. And being able to block any attack in your general direction would drastically have improved how Konoko controlled during combat. And you would at least be able to fight more than one person at a time in a somewhat decent competent fashion.

But again, due to the tank controls, it’s just way too inconvenient to fight multiple opponents efficiently, yet the game is constantly throwing multiple opponents at you. So what do you do? Well, because of the stiff controls, it’s actually just easier to run. Yes, run. Run straight ahead and just do running grab attacks on enemies, because everything else is a complete gamble as to whether or not it will actually work or if you will get clobbered because the auto-block didn’t work.

This is because the movement system is completely borked. If you move the left analog stick, Konoko will do a slight hop to the left or the right before actually moving, so it makes it difficult to move out of the way quickly. So it’s just easier to run. “Why don’t you just roll-dodge out of the way?” I don’t hear you ask. Well, it’s because roll-dodging is slow and stiff and you can still be attacked because they aren’t invincible frames.

Plus, roll-dodging or jump-rolling is extremely slow because of how floaty those movements are, which makes them easy for Konoko to get punished with either jump attacks or counters. I found myself using the dodges less and less as the game went on, save for maybe the backwards cartwheel, which could get you out of a bind and create a bit of space. But there’s also the issue of getting stuck on the geometry, which happens often, as you attempt to surprise enemies from around corners or attempt to run alongside the wall to avoid detection.

“So why not just rely on shooting enemies at a distance?” I can’t hear you exclaim. Well, you can’t because ammo is extremely limited and you only get it from downed enemies or non-hostile NPCs scattered about the levels, and usually you only have one or two magazines per weapon type at any given time. And given how much ammo it takes to down a single enemy, long-range attacks simply are not viable. The stage designs force you into close encounters. But worse yet is that the aiming on the guns is absolutely horrible. There is a soft-lock feature on enemies who get close enough with certain weapons, but otherwise you have to manually aim and the aiming is both stiff and over-sensitive at the same time; the worst kind of aiming. It’s stiff in the sense that positioning Konoko is slow but there is no smoothing, so slight movements on the right stick causes the reticule to jut around, making things like sniping and long range attacks completely nonviable.

Worse yet is that trying to switch weapons is an absolute pain during the heat of combat. If you have a weapon out and you try to switch to another one, you have to stop over it and press the R3 button. This may not sound like it’s tough but you have to be positioned right over the weapon in the right way to pick it up. So if you run out of ammo in a weapon and want to switch to another, you have to meticulously walk over the weapon and press R3, but if you’re not careful then R3 is also the button to store or pull out your weapon. So you can imagine that with relentless AI, janky controls, and input latency, trying to swap weapons is not easy.

The game makes you work to try to pull off decent long-range attacks, and that just makes long-range combat a chore… no different than the close-quarters combat. But it all wouldn’t have been too bad if the AI wasn’t so relentless. This is one of those scenarios where a dumb AI would have been better than Terminator AI because dumb AI could have let you feel a little bit like the heroine instead of just getting beat down mercilessly or having to cheese the game by avoiding combat and running around like a chicken and spamming running neck-cranks to whittle down the number of your foes. So that leads to the next section…

The AI Is Unbalanced

You simply are given no quarter from the AI. The first two or three stages aren’t too bad, but even then you’ll note that in the second stage where you go to the office building, once the cinematic ends and the action starts, the enemy AI just spam-fire their weapons at you before you can do anything with their aimbot accuracy. Now when I first played I just passed it off that it was how the AI was positioned in the level and they just wanted to start the level with a bang. Fair enough. But no, this is just how the AI operate when they have a weapon. They aimbot you from wherever they see you and spam-fire until they either run out of ammo or their internal alert timer runs out.

This is one of the most frustrating parts about the game because you can’t properly stealth behind enemies and take them down – for some odd reason the controls act wonky and as you’re trying to pull off a grab move Konoko may just walk into them and alert them or perform a jumping attack instead. There is an instant-kill grab move from behind, but I was only able to pull it off once throughout the entire game and I did it by mistake while trying to attack another guy, but there was an enemy NPC in front of me with his back to me, and I ended up doing an instant-kill grab move on him. Nice. Now if only it had actually worked during all those times where I was actually trying to perform stealth grab takedowns.

This becomes unbearably frustrating on level 14, where they have few save points, and the level is rather large, there are a ton of enemies, and there are few health drops. The way the stage is designed is that enemies can see you from all the way across the warehouse due to the open glass, and so stealth is almost impossible to pull off correctly unless you do it in a very particular way. So I wasted three hours trying to do that awful stage. If you attack one enemy too soon then others get alerted; if an enemy fires off a weapon it alerts a handful of others and you won’t be able to beat them all unless you cheese it and use the monkey-flip grab maneuver to toss the guys off the platform. The guns in the stage take forever to kill the heavily armored enemies, so it completely zaps all the fun out of fighting.

Plus, the enemies having invincible downed frames, or being able to use their special attacks frequently that you cannot interrupt really kills the flow. Level 14 in particular is a stage that is designed for masochists.

The first part is simple enough because you can just grab an invisibility cloak and run straight into the base, bypassing the snipers and the guards. And then you just have to fight a few guards in a laser hallway before getting into the meat of the warehouse. It’s in the warehouse where things just become tediously annoying, and the AI go from being obnoxiously hard to impossibly frustrating. They can see and hear so much so often that trying to limit how many get alerted becomes a herculean task all its own.

But then things get worse when you throw in shielded enemies, or these obnoxious ninjas who can teleport or phase around, and can counter your moves or grab you whenever you get close. Fighting some of the enemies literally just comes down to luck, or, once again, cheese-spamming the running neck-crank grab maneuver, which is probably Konoko’s most reliable move. The problem is that the game lacks a proper Rock, Paper, Scissors enemy combat mechanic.

Typically if an enemy is impervious to light combos or basic melee attacks, they’re susceptible to grab moves; or if they are impervious to grab moves they are susceptible to light attacks; or if they are impervious to light attacks or grab moves, you can use jumping attacks on them. Not the case here. Here, all enemies who aren’t the scrub factory workers or low-HP guards will counter your jump attacks almost every time, rendering them useless unless you use them as a surprise attack. All enemies can grab you, and they will grab you any time you do a move that leaves you open. All enemies can do combos on you, and all enemies can perform special moves on you. Basically, all enemies are perfectly viable for beating the crap out of you. And sometimes the AI will just randomly decide to utilize a scrub guard to just counter your attacks, block all your moves, and grab you whenever possible, forcing you to have to redo the last checkpoint, which in some cases might have been half-an-hour (or an hour) before it last saved.

This makes the game unnervingly punishing, and for no real reason. Back in the day, game son the NES, Genesis, and SNES were super-hard because most games back then were barely four hours long. But Oni is a game that is at least eight to ten hours long, even if you move through relatively quickly. So it becomes even longer when you have these punishing checkpoints, Terminator-style AI, and obnoxiously designed levels where they make it extremely difficult just to get through and have fun. It’s like they designed to make you hate the gameplay mechanics and loathe fighting multiple enemies. It’s the complete opposite of the design philosophy behind a game series like Devil May Cry, where they wanted you to fight enemies and wanted you to indulge in the fight, and wanted you to enjoy the fight.

Conclusion

Oni had a ton of potential that was only ever fully realized in other games by other companies who took The Matrix-style acrobatic combat mechanisms and applied them in much more competently designed games. I could be forgiving of the awful controls if the AI wasn’t so punishing, just the same as I could be forgiving of the punishing AI if the combat and movement controls were a lot smoother. But punishing AI and awful controls just turned the game into a recipe for disaster, especially with the way a lot of the levels were laid out.

There was really only one really cool level and that was level 13, as you raided the TCTF headquarters, and made your way down into the basement to face off against the TCTF director. The enemies were relatively spaced out properly, and even with the spaced out checkpoints and traps sprinkled throughout, it was a stage that made the best uses of Oni‘s design philosophy without punishing the players too badly. Enemies were still bullet sponges, but they gave you enough weapons and proper corridor layouts so you were never cornered or forced into no-win situations.

It’s just a shame because only a few levels were actually designed around complimenting Oni’s restrictive mechanics rather than flagellating you for them. This is the sort of game I could see ending up on Ross’ Game Dungeon, and he eventually gives up and quits on level 14 at the warehouse segment because it’s so impossibly difficult. And even if you manage to get past that part, the segment after that is just as ridiculous with all of the shielded ninjas and snipers on the platforms above and below you that you can’t see.

If the gaming industry was so intent on deserting its core demographic, Oni is the perfect game due for a remake at the hands of Team Ninja or Platinum Games. The story was actually pretty cool; I loved all of Konoko’s outfits; her personality wasn’t off-putting, and the concept of acrobatic third-person shooting/melee combat is still an enticing treat if pulled off correctly. Unfortunately, Bungie did not pull off the mechanics for Oni correctly at all.