Onechanbara stampedes out of the gate with a straight-faced parade of sex and vitality. I’ve seen the ludicrous breast physics of Dead or Alive, experienced the exponential theater or Bayonetta, and indulged in the ostentatious costumes of two decades of Japanese role-playing games, but I’ve rarely seen them all indiscriminately combined into a Cerberus of skin, distortion, and violence like Onechanbara. I suppose this was also true of Onechanbara’s previous iterations, last seen stateside Bikini Samurai Squad on Xbox 360 and Bikini Zombie Slayers on Wii, but the added fidelity brought by current generation platforms makes Z2: Chaos all the more extravagant.
In context, Onechanbara operates with the equivalence and sophistication of an asexual drag show. Vampire sisters Kagura and Saaya end up working with rival Baneful Blood-infused half-sisters Aya and Saki, teaming up for a four-woman cacophony fueled by insatiable bloodlust and scraps of clothing. Kagura and Aya’s default costumes seem to highlight the fact that they’re exposing every part of their asses other than the bullseye, which no doubt aided by ridiculous breasts with hilarious physics attached. Like I get that this is meant to appeal to people who aren’t me, but, at a certain point, one must say, for f—‘s sake.
I don’t claim to know what the purpose of Onechanbara’s crazy costumes are, but their outfits are akin to something that would make The Ultimate Warrior blush, and more of a curious series of wardrobe malfunctions than legitimately titillating indulgences. Their clothes are the visual equivalent of a visually impaired person getting lost in a stripper’s dressing room and wandering out into the harsh light of day. Minus the regrettable up-skirt thing, Saaya and Saki’s default appearances come out a bit less worse for wear, but the whole package is still a relative blight on gaming culture.
If there’s an actual story to Onechanbara it’s consumed by senseless jet-setting to combat some sort of massive worldwide plague. Zombies or the relative undead appear to be invading the planet, and the rest, between some interpersonal politics and an apparent executive villain, remain unclear. Onechanbara’s story is expressed with decently acted dialogue and displayed with some interesting comic book framed cut-scenes, but it’s composed of the same banal minutia that defines its narrative. It’s composed exclusively of women roguishly insulting in each in a manner typically reserved for men (which is actually a fantastic play on genre norms, and would be interesting if it were in service to anything), and not much else.
Onechanbara’s blue skies and bright colors might suggest you’re at least occupying fanciful environments, but even these are as fleeting as its characters. Endless halls disguised as caves, laboratories, and office buildings express identical trappings that mask identifiable progress, and are an obvious waste. More disappointing is Onechanbara’s endeavor to free-form exploration. The middle of the game allows you to select between assignments in Japan, Dubai, Los Angeles, Peru and China in any order, but it’s all set dressing inside empty arenas. Los Angeles features a sliver of what you’d think the Santa Monica Pier would look like if you had never actually been to the Santa Monica Pier. Japan appears to take place entirely on the roof of Kansai International Airport, and Peru and China are vague outdoor paths. Dubai has literally nothing to do with Dubai, appearing as a bunch of aimless sand dunes in the desert.
About the only thing Onechanbara gets right is its unwavering frame rate. “Sixty frames-per-second” has a complicated relationship between what gamers expect and what developers can create, but it’s difficult to say action games of Onechanbara’s style aren’t better with higher frame count and smoother presentation. You have to do this if you want to create a competent action game, and its one facet that Onechanbara commits to throughout its content. What’s on screen may not be objectively beautiful, but it’s often running at a pace that makes it clean up nice.
Unfortunately Onechanbara’s stellar frame-rate isn’t protecting much of precise importance. At its core, the game is closer to a crowd-control brawler like Musou game, rather than an implied comparison to a methodical and calculated action game like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. Each woman is outfitted with two changeable weapons and granted a suite of weirdly demanding commands to compliment said weapons. The primary means of offense is generated through mixing, matching, and delaying two separate attacks. Different weapons, commands, and stat-boosting rings can be bought with points earned by progression and performance.
Onechanbara manages a few wrinkles inside its elusive combat system. The most interesting is the necessity to push a button to wipe blood away from a weapon, an action that either refines the weapon back to its highest damage output or (sometimes) can lead to a risk/reward with certain characters. Each lady is also privy to a relative super attack called Xtasy Mode, which can be earned and engaged by excessively destroying fools in combat. It’s worth noting that Xtasy Mode dispenses with subtlety entirely, affixing each lady with strange nipple-less breasts and outrageous multicolored hair. As you do.
Other aspects of the combat system are more chaotic than useful. Skills, governed in meters of three, help with crowd control and these weird zombies covered in muck. All four women, whom can typically be stitched between at any time, can also be called in simultaneously with the push of the Dual Shock 4’s touchpad, though this never seemed to do anything other than look cool and crazy. A ranged lock-on jump, a quickness reward for timing moves successful, and a haphazard dodge + time slowdown lifted from Bayonetta round out some of Onechanbara’s more creative options.
On easier modes Onechanbara can occupy the realm of mash-fest, quickly folding in on itself with minimal attention paid to where and what you’re doing. Through more difficult applications, not a whole lot changes. The issue isn’t necessarily in its systems—provided you can nail the timing between attack inputs one might be able to mine some depth out of Onechanbara’s characters—but rather in the tests of skill presented to the player. Through every encounter I felt like the game was giving up, shrugging its shoulders, and repeatedly dumping the same five or six enemy types onto the playing field. It’s a maze of repeating content.
Basic zombies are fodder and shredded instantly. Some military guys fire machine guns that sometimes require immediate attention. Muck-things require Xtasy mode or special moves to shut down. Mid-bosses have ridiculous HP and hit a bit harder, and actual bosses are rote fights punctuated with touchpad-swiping quick-time events. There’s zero craft to anything. This is most evident in the 13 and 14th chapter when Onechanbara visibly gives up and just assaults the player with room after room of identical, boring encounters. Survival isn’t especially a challenge as much as managing the resolve to see it all through to completion. Outside of some boss fights, which aren’t great but at least have the audacity to be different, Onechanbara is one soulless monster corridor after another.
I thought maybe this would change once I finished the game and unlocked further difficulty options, but that only strengthened my dislike of Onechanbara’s systems. Unlocking a ton of new moves, weapons, and rings to support my characters helped a bit, but higher enemy HP counts and more frequent annoying-move deployment couldn’t keep up with the tools I was given. Managing the lock-on button, which has to be held down for it to work, alongside the run button and a breadth of start-and-stop combos was a fool’s errand, and it ruined any effort to beat Onechanbara’s deeper systems and progress through the game. It doesn’t require or reward skill, but rather dismisses the resolve to merely pass through.
There’s scant activity outside of Onechanbara’s campaign. A level select is a given, as are Missions in the same levels with specific parameters (like only defeating enemies following a chase action) governing a reward. Game-spanning Quests, like killing tons of enemies in Xtasy form or stomping enemies to death, are also available, and generally reward the player with greater costume options. To that end, Onechanbara also delivers concept art and a model viewer to go along with all of its accessories and costumes. The accessories, which range from a permanent piece of toast-in-mouth to full costume changes, are great for visual variation, but the model viewer and posing options reinforce my worst suspicions about what Onechanbara’s extracurricular applications may entail.
Value is another medium where Onechanbara falls into controversy. Most of the way this game behaves would be acceptable if it were a budget title—and you could make an argument that a $50 physical PlayStation 4 release, even with all of its bonus items, is indeed “budget”—but its performance can’t hang with any of its peers. Load times are obscene; it takes 20+ seconds to load the character select screen, and another 25 to launch into a level. This a facet which the development team was seemingly aware of, as they allow you to page through numerous pages of wordy tool-tips during said loading screens. Onechanbara, outside of its highly decorated protagonists, is also short on visual splendor, and can’t account for a scarcity of engaging content across the board.
Through the process of playing through and writing about Onechanbara I was hoping to find something, anything to talk about other than the impending shitstorm of calamitous character design, but the simple truth is it doesn’t engender any further discussion. Onechanbara is quick, occasionally pretty, and has some great role-reversal dialogue, but the enemy encounters feel incongruous with combat mechanics, and the levels designed to facilitate conflict feel like an escalating series of wasted opportunities.
