Oninaki

Oninaki is equipped with all of the necessary materials to construct a genuine Japanese role-playing game. It has a world consumed by fantastic corruption and engulfed in despairing melancholy. It features combat mechanics with a creative hook and a considerable allowance of player agency. The visual package has a consistent aesthetic that works its chibi euphoria into surreal, dreamlike framework. If a mandatory box is available, Oninaki has a checkmark next to it.

Oninaki, the third title and first action role-playing game from Square-Enix’s appropriately named Tokyo RPG Factory, has every genre prerequisite imaginable and no clear or defined means of self-expression. Like Chrono Trigger’s Enetron device, Oninaki explores the theory of feeling full and hungry at the exact same point in time. Any investment of personal time, agency, and effort can only pay off by revealing the economics of Oninaki‘s impulsive assembly. It’s a drudgery of ideas forced to work together for no reason other than it has before and it has to now. The totality of Oninaki’s performance paints a grim picture of the AA RPG space in 2019.

Many of Oninaki’s ideas open with an inviting and engaging premise. Its world is founded on the belief that reincarnation is natural, and the recently-deceased hanging onto shreds of their mortal life is a grave and constant social issue. Linger too long and the dead will never reincarnate and, instead, become a hostile entity. “Watchers” act as spirit police, encouraging the living to let go of their dead loved ones, and coerce the dead to strengthen their resolve to pass on. Most people, as you expect, have troubling accepting the facts of this life.

Reincarnation as a backbone of society’s operation, and legions of people who have a hard time dealing with this tragic fate, is a really neat idea! Oninaki is consumed with reincarnation and posits an entire world in which it is the only force of movement and motivation for anything. It makes sense from a development standpoint—a singular focus with limited tools really helps sell a world—but not so much from an operational perspective. For the world to exist it has to be populated with dimensional characters with interests beyond what’s in the player’s focus. If you’ve ever listened to a song with all but one of its instruments isolated, you can get an idea where the problems with Oninaki’s world-building arise.

The player is cast into the role of a Watcher, Kagachi. With his companion Mayura and a troupe of fellow Watchers, Kagachi nurses a zero cool persona with occasional moments of tenderness. He’ll help a young, recently-deceased boy move on by (at their suggestion) killing his parents and erasing the boy’s point of contact to the mortal world. Kagachi doesn’t necessarily delight in his edge-lording activities, preferring instead to consider every transaction a measure of stately business (Watchers can only be appointed by a governing head, the Sovereign).

The centralized problem with Kagachi is his failure to operate as a human being with an identifiable animus. Every single person he meets is concealing a world-shattering ulterior motive to which Kagachi is incessantly oblivious. Even Kagachi isn’t safe from the escalating series of surprises, as Oninaki’s second act twist concerns his own state of existence. The narrative is told in a series of escalating revelations, all of which come at the cost of character and coherence. I can believe in Oninaki’s world, I just can’t accept that any of its named citizens have spent any amount of time living inside of it. They only exist for as long as they’re on the screen.

Like Oninaki’s narrative, its world also presents a hollow visage. The first half of Oninaki dispatches Kagachi to lush and diverse selection of this ethereal planet’s environments. The twilight marsh of the Sook Fens and the rosy forest of The Eternal Garden are evocative of a wild imagination under the limitations of economical budget. Oninaki looks great, but it’s hard to say if it’s in service of distinguishable world-building. Sure, lost souls may demand Kagachi return to locations in order to compose the bulk of Oninaki’s sidequests, but there isn’t much mechanical diversity between them. Each environment is a careful corridor with differing breakable objects, and all seem to have just one path you can’t traverse until later. The only defining asset that comes to mind is Shadestone Quarry’s cable cars moving Kagachi from one cliff to another.

The other half of Oninaki’s world, literally, is in the Veil. Kagachi and his fellow Watchers can “pierce the veil” at any time with the L2 button. This flips the contrast on the visual pallet, essentially rendering a negative image of normal existence. It’s here that friendly ghosts occupy space. It’s also another spot for Oninaki’s roving bands of monsters to occupy. The Veil is a neat narrative conceit, but it’s also another demonstration of Oninaki’s economy of mechanics. Through the Veil the size of every dungeon, and every monster in the dungeon, is effectively doubled.

Oninaki finds difficulty in creating a distinct feeling of separation. You visit an outdoor environment and, sometimes, descend into an identical series of brown dungeons. Then it’s back to town to regroup and reiterate every active conspiracy. Then it’s back to another environment that is visually different but mechanically identical. It might have a dungeon. Oninaki operates this way until its second half, when it assigns a new reason to return to most of the places you’ve already visited. Oninaki has a subscription to itself and the repetition is maddening.

Some of this could have been assuaged if the general point of contact, obliterating mobs of monsters, had more of a bite to it. Oninaki performs as an action role-playing game with Kagachi, through his spirit Daemons hovering close by, performing a single, repeating physical attack. Skills, bound to cool-down timers, can be unlocked to perform up to four other attacks. Each Daemon also has a unique action button, like warping, rolling, dashing, or jumping. These are not bad ideas.

Combat composes a significant portion of Oninaki’s run-time. A handful of enemy varieties will consume the screen. Scorpion things lob bombs overhead, lizard things burrow underground and charge at the player, and large goofy monsters open up their stomachs and suck everything inside. Bashing monsters builds a percentage called Affinity, and cashing-in that affinity after it reaches 100% grants a few moments overpowered (read: not inhibited by delays) attack spamming and skill spending. Affinity can actually go even higher, but starts cutting into the player’s defense after 150%.

Oninaki’s problem is the incongruity between a necessary operating speed and the pace at which it actually performs. Enemies and bosses feel like they’re moving at 1.5x speed while the player is bound to maybe half of that. Any attempt at dodging or getting out of the way has to be planned with inhuman foresight, and most attempts at evasion only succeed in interrupting the flow of combat. Even if you’re used to the instant call-and-response mechanics from PlatinumGames’ least satisfying work, Oninaki can only disappoint. It is a machine built to slow the player down.

A charitable reading of Oninaki places it closer toward a slower, more deliberate variety of action game. Daemons feel like tools used to align this particular theory with basic logic. Switching between Daemons—Triez with his chain whips, Lucika with her firsts, Izana with her scythe, Zephyr which is a literal beast you can ride—are all intended to direct the flow of combat to suit the needs of every encounter. They delay in switching between Daemons seems to exist to prevent the player from cheesing every instance, but, instead, it adds to the stunted and stuttering apprehension of Oninaki’s combat. It never commits to being a focused action brawler despite its fondness for packing the screen with menacing opposition.

In line with Oninaki’s lack of focus is its menagerie of Daemons. The on-screen effect, with animated ghosts hovering behind Kagachi, is visually inspired. Switching between four Daemons on-the-fly provides satisfying options, too. Once you’ve acquired a dozen of these things, however, the paralysis of choice becomes apparent. The gut says to use whichever Daemons you like and play the game however you want. The overly analytical brain wonders which are the best and which ones you should be using.

The Daemon selection issue is further complicated by Oninaki’s progression system. Each Daemon has their own (bewilderingly rendered by Oninaki’s user interface) series of skill trees. Using Daemons in battle causes weapon stones to occasionally pop out of enemies and the skill tree consumes those stones. Some stones can be shared between Daemons with similar bladed or ranged weapons, but it often feels like you’re only leveling one up at a time (and the Daemon-spanning Null stones, which can be used for anyone’s skill tree, are only rewarded through lost soul quests and bosses). Getting a new Daemon late in the game often comes with the realization that they won’t be as good as an existing party without a lot of grinding. And the last thing I wanted to do in Oninaki was grind. There was already so much fighting and I was so tired.

It’s a shame because, like so many aspects of Oninaki, Daemons are great ideas. Four nodes on each Daemon’s skill tree will unlock backstory and lore dumps for each Daemon, adding personality to their otherwise ephemeral presence. Lost souls in service to human masters presents character dynamic Oninaki isn’t especially interested in exploring, but it adds depth and texture to its weird world. Concepts of death and birth are complicated by in-between ghosts that Watchers, somehow, employ as violent slaves. Existential fear is an underappreciated narrative tool.

By the midpoint of Oninaki I had retreated to almost exclusively using one Daemon, the range-specialist Dia. Her three-pronged volley of bolt shots was relatively slow, but Noble Dream (a massive green projectile), Constellation (a selection of homing lasers), Black and White (one of her many ‘kill everything on the screen’ attacks) and Ambush (an attack directly from Dia) made short work of almost anything. All of Dia’s skills, like all of the other Daemons, felt unique thanks to their custom animations. Tokyo RPG Factory put a lot of work into making each Daemon feel unique, even if most players likely won’t find and develop every single one. It’s one of the few facets of Oninaki that feels realized to its greatest potential.

Like Lost Sphear, Tokyo RPG Factory’s second game, Oninaki suffers from the debatable necessity of its myriad player options. An entire weapon crafting system allows the player to feed weapons to other weapons and max out damage values. Shadestones can be earned as loot and slotted into certain weapons and provide a selection of stat buffs and options. Daemon skills can even be slotted with four different external buffs. I suppose this is valuable for high-level play on Oninaki’s hardest difficulty, but it can largely be ignored by most players. If Oninaki were better positioned to take advantage of its myriad systems perhaps it would have made more of a difference.

Oninaki’s shortcomings feel like the result of a tight production schedule on an efficiency-minded budget. It looks good, but it doesn’t look great. It plays well, but it’s easy to see room for improvement. It’s loaded with content, but short on provisions. None of this would matter if Oninaki were appropriately priced, but a $50 digital-only release is a huge ask from Square-Enix. There are plenty of games that don’t make the buyer heavily qualify their decision to spend $50 on a something that’s only notch above whatever RPG Kemco is releasing this month.

In Oninaki, Tokyo RPG Factory has obliged its name and produced a product that feels like it came off of an assembly line. It’s like someone forced an AI to play and replay every 90’s Japanese role-playing game and also Diablo and then allowed it to produce a game that is, technically, original. Between leveling up Daemons, aiding lost souls, and progressing Oninaki’s story, there’s enough room for over fifty hours of “content.” Finding a reason to engage with any of it, let alone stick it out until the story is concluded, is a completely different challenge.

Oninaki is an abundance of compelling ideas enveloped in a fog of stammering expression. An extensive progression system, myriad combat options, and a sincere and original premise aren’t enough to overcome the rote execution of its world, characters, and basic combat. Oninaki’s only viable curiosity is what kind of game it may have been with more time, budget, and expertise.