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Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad.
360 Review
Since I discovered the bountiful beauty of beautiful bounty that is the crowd slaying Ninety Nine Nights I have been an avowed and faithful lover of the hack ‘n’ slash genre particularly when delivered with large crowd combat and I must admit that I found the opportunity to have just such a hack ‘n’ slash where the gore meter was in the insane realms of the classic PC title Carmageddon a little more appealing than perhaps I should have.
You may wonder why I have slipped off on a slight tangent of strange comparisons in this review, this is perhaps because it really is going to be the easiest and best way to explain this game, its faults and its foibles in a half decent manner because this ‘budget’ game borrows so much from so many others that it really is either a badly delivered homage to this genre of video gaming, a brilliant parody of same or just a wholesale rip-off of other games mechanics.
Suffice to say the plot is a relatively straightforward affair and is somewhat limited, presumably because having a decent plot might get somewhat in the way of what you are actually there for, which is of course killing multiple zombies with your samurai swords. After all what need of you of a plot when Tokyo has been overtaken by zombies? Everyone knows that zombies=bad after all. Still, I will indulge it slightly; as the game does at some level similarly indulge in a plot. For an evil corporation has managed to release a large number of zombies on to the streets of Tokyo and the only hope of survival for the rest of humanity is your team of somewhat unconventional Zombie slayers; step forward an obvious correlation with Resident Evil - but sadly the comparisons with this game end right here.
The opening titles introduce the games unconventional team - two sisters both cursed with ‘baneful blood’. This baneful blood allows for the release of a deadly superpower move which, when bathed in enough zombie blood allows the sisters to enter rampage mode and double the damage on the Zombie masses, ala the special moves in Ninety Nine Nights. Sadly these special moves also take off your own health as well and can only be stopped by one of three things; having a ‘Goddess’ Statue nearby, picking up and using a Goddess Statue fragment (of which you can only hold three at a time) or completing the level - so hitting the rampage mode with no Goddess Statue in sight and no fragments left leaves you with a quickly dying character with nothing to do but hope that one of your enemies might be either the last one to kill, or might handily drop a Goddess fragment.
Unfortunately the area in which you get to fight is hideously limited, as you move only from a rural area on the edge of Tokyo, to a small part of central Tokyo, into the sewers underneath that small part of central Tokyo and back again ad absurdum. Sure, it isn’t the point of the game to have a surfeit of locations, but this is so restricted it may as well be Devil May Cry 4.
The characters themselves are animated, but only just; Onechanbara has some of the most poorly animated cut-scenes ever, using the 3D models of the game to deliver much of the interstitial plot outlines and the movement of the characters in the game itself is hideously simple, so much so that you’ll be left wondering if the games designers were high, college juniors, or simply non-existent for the entire development process. The game itself could have been released on the Xbox or PS2 and you could still fairly argue that the graphics are sub-par.
The game play itself is rudimentary; which is the point I suppose of a hack ‘n’ slash game, you kill or be killed until the end of each level and that is it, that’s your game play right there – step forward Dynasty Warriors in fact. The only nod to originality being the switching system - which allows you to cycle between the two members of your team to offer a slight amount of variation. I say variation because one of the characters packs projectile weapons rather than a samurai sword. Unfortunately the lock-on which allows you to spray bullets at a certain point is so poor that a simple movement to one side or the other may well result in your character getting mauled by Zombies because the command to sidle to the left or right appears to be the same as that for switch to a 45 degree angle immediately and shoot at thin air while the Zombies that were formerly in front of you have a you shaped supper.
Before I wrap this review up, I must say that I have this funny feeling this game was actually localized in Japan. I say this because there are obvious errors in the English, perhaps not so bad as the ‘All of your base are belong to us’ in Zero Wing, but nearing it; the third character of your team for example should be perhaps called Anna, but this has been so poorly translated she is referred to throughout the game as ‘Annna’. Perhaps I am being unduly harsh here, most of the translation problems aren’t actually translation problems themselves but are instead the result of trying to read a font on-screen that is so badly kerned that you sometimes really can’t tell where a word starts and finishes. Add to this the awful font selection which has an ‘a’ that renders almost identically to the ‘o’ and much of the fun, or consternation (depending on your mood) is actually in trying to follow the plot synopsis for each level - which you do need to do if you actually care what is going on, given that the voice-acting is still in the original Japanese.
But I digress, does a good game need to have any originality, plot, depth of game play, good graphics or intelligent scripting if it has a ‘Barbie-Doll Mechanic’ ala Soul Calibur IV and ‘Independent Breast Physics’ ala Dead or Alive? Well, yes actually. Yes it does; oh did I not mention these earlier? Think you can forgive anything so long as it has these two ‘wonderful’ ideas? Well think again, you can choose not to believe me if you want and try it for yourself, but don't say I didn't warn you, chances are you will want to scrub your eyes until they bleed after witnessing it in action.
So what of Onechanbara? Is it a parody an homage or a blatant rip-off? Well, sadly it is the latter, it’s just a list of mechanics whipped from other titles and badly implimented and delivered at that. All in all, it really does do what it says on the tin, but if you want a hack ‘n’ slash there’s Ninety Nine Nights, if you want a splatter-fest there’s Carmageddon, if you want to laugh at bad scripting there’s Zero Wing, if you want a surfeit of zombies, there’s Resident Evil, if you want a Barbie-Doll mechanic there’s Soul Calibur IV and if you want Independent Breast Physics there’s Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 2. Nothing Onechanbara does is better than its predecessors, but hey – don’t let me put you off trying it - at only thirty pounds it is a ‘budget title’ after all and as much as I've mauled it for its poor delivery I did play it for a good ten hours, meaning there is some enjoyment to be found in doing nothing else but exactly what it says on the tin.
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Game Info
Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad
Xbox 360
Publisher:
D3 Publishing
Developer:
Tamsoft
Release:
27th Feb 2009
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