Resurrection | Oni

Format: PS2 / PC | Genre: Action | Publisher: Gathering of Developers | Developer: Bungie | Released: 2001 | Why now? It deserves a break…

By Andy Johnson

Oni is quite an enigmatic game, one which secured itself a place in history as a kind of heroic failure. Almost completely unique in its status as a story-driven, futuristic third-person fighting game, especially so on the PC, Oni was in many ways a breathtaking achievement that could easily have been enormously successful and spawned a lengthy line of sequels and imitators.

Instead, because of a number of comparitively minor flaws and unfortunate circumstances, Oni has been sidelined by history in favour of the huge-selling flagship Bungie series: Halo. Despite that, Oni still has a fairly small but devoted community, which over the years has produced mountains of fan fiction, art, and even a long-standing mod project to craft, almost from scratch, an Oni 2 - a dream that so far looks a long way from fulfilment.

//Low art
Developed in California by short-lived subsidiary Bungie West, Oni looked like something special even before it was completed and released. A stagey trailer was released to magazine cover discs, featuring elaborate fighting sequences and even a confrontation with a Metal Gear-esque three-story robot filmed in an early build, intercut with film-style slogans. The game was to be set in a dystopic, hyper-urban future heavily inspired by Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga series Ghost in the Shell. The plot hints at themes of world government, biotechnology, scientific monopoly, environmental cataclysm, and state propaganda, among others.

In Oni you play as Konoko, an orphaned ward of the World Coalition Government, and a highly trained agent of their Technology Crimes Task Force - a powerful law enforcement agency dedicated to the suppression of the manufacture and smuggling of illegalised technology like experimental weapons, genetic manipulation gear, and exotic narcotics. The TCTF’s main opponent is the global terrorist/criminal network the Syndicate, led by the shadowy figure of Muro, a criminal mastermind dealing in everything the TCTF stands against. So far, so hackneyed - Konoko is sent off on her first mission to carry out a “simple bust, in and out,” as described by her iron-willed superior Commander Griffin. From there, though, Oni becomes gradually more and more interesting as its plot unfurls. It’s a journey of self-discovery, in which Konoko steadily struggles against appearances in search of the realities behind them. It’s not high art by any means, but Oni is surprisingly affecting at times.

//Crack some heads
But you don’t actually play this game to be ‘affected’, but rather to crack some heads, right? The combat system is hugely elaborate, with Konoko gradually acquiring new moves as the game progresses. There’s the running lariat, suplexes, backbreaker, and a wide array of combos. Best of all is the fact that all the game’s types of character have their own set of specific moves and temperaments. Syndicate striker troops range from cautious to showy, tankers use splashy wrestling moves, and ninjas move in a rapid blur, using slides and flips to avoid attacks. Working out the best ways to counter these varied approaches is a joy, and the endless ways to take down, say, two red strikers and a comms trooper make Oni endlessly replayable, especially given the many different combinations of enemies, weapons, strategies, and environmental hazards like pools of toxic waste, fires, and huge drops.

The guns are definitely the secondary choice of pain-dispensing, but they’re interestingly implemented. All of them have visible laser sights meaning that conventional reticules don’t clutter the game’s fairly minimalist heads-up display. Among the more interesting boomsticks are the Van de Graaf pistol, which momentarily stuns enemies; the superball man-portable mortar, which is essentially a grenade launcher with a massive spread of splash damage; and the mercury bow, beloved of TCTF snipers, which delivers a frozen sliver of mercury to the target, no less. Suffice it to say, Oni’s combat is brilliant.

//Showtime
The animation was very clever at the time, and still impresses today. It helps Konoko and just about everyone else in the game to come across as unspeakably cool, especially as our heroine appears in different outfits through the game, Lara Croft-style. There are some gloriously cinematic moments in the cutscenes, two or three of which would make appearances if I were to ever compile a list of the most awesome cutscenes ever. The bit where Konoko just makes into TCTF regional HQ before the security doors close on her during a Syndicate attack is particularly exquisite. “Showtime!”

So if it’s this good, it raises the question of why Oni didn’t actually take off in the way I think it deserved to. We’ll probably never be sure, and Bungie hardly care these days, given how they’re rolling in dosh thanks to the Halo trilogy. Maybe the Japanese anime stylings put people off. Maybe it wasn’t marketed effectively enough to sell. There’s no doubting that the game has flaws - the texturing is extremely plain and the level design is sometimes extremely bland; the game needs a little more exposition and backstory to really carry its plot home; and so on. But Oni is a deserving cult game, a game which proved that martial arts combat in a story-driven, level-based world could be every bit as gripping - and more so - than the endless reams of shooters and side-on conventional fighting games out there. Oni dared to be a little different, and like so many noble games, has been consigned to relative obscurity. Luckily, it’s still relatively easy to find, and with a quick replacement .exe, can be made to run perfectly at highish resolutions under XP. And you never know, maybe an Oni 2 of some form may one day surface…