- Note: If you’d like to see the game in action check out the Let’s Play video at the bottom of this review.
The Onechanbara series has been about for over a decade now, first appearing on the PlayStation 2 as part of the Simple 2000 series in Japan. Despite starting life as a budget title the game has picked up quite the cult following over the years. The gameplay and presentation has gotten a bit slicker each time, but overall the core of the game has remained the same.
The core of the game is that you slice and dice a bunch of monsters as a scantily clad ass-kicking woman. In Onechanbara Z2: Chaos you do this as part of a team of four. The game is clearly influenced by the kind of films you’d see in a 70’s Grindhouse cinema and the revealing nature of some outfits may put some users off.
The funny thing is despite the skimpy outfits the game does a great job at passing the Bechdel test. The conversations the characters have don’t mention men and if you want to tone down the revealing nature of the outfits you can. Yes the developers made a pre-order bonus where you can replace their outfits with small pieces of fruit. Do you have to use that though? No.
Once you look pass the dress-up aspects of the game, what are you left with? The answer is a hack and slash game with lots of blood and cheesy moments. Combat wise the game is quite satisfying. You can chain together combos and switch between all four party members as you go to put together some great attacks. You can even call in the rest of your team to battle with when the going gets tough. Combos are satisfying to pull off, especially when you get in to triple figures for hits in a row and trigger your ultimate seamlessly to finish off the enemies.
Unfortunately the addictiveness of the gameplay is let down by some dodgy AI and some extremely bland areas to fight in. At least once a level I had to run about an area that was blocked off trying to find the one enemy that was either A) stuck on scenery or B) just standing in a corner. Hack and slash games rely on joining together combos and hit counts, and unfortunately sometimes you just can’t carry them on in this due to poor design and AI.
It’s not just the areas that feel bland though. As you progress through the game you’ll start to see sub-bosses recycled again and again. Sub-bosses that aren’t interesting to fight in the slightest and will have you rolling your eyes each time they pop-up. It’s a shame because the bosses they have in the game that only appear once are interesting battles that feel fun. They are a shining light in this game, as are the QTE moments that feature in the boss battles.
The QTE moments work well as they feel a bit different to what we’re used to as gamers thanks to the DualShock 4, which have been designed exclusively using the touchpad, which adds nicely to what you’re doing. If you are told to slice down you will see the character on screen slicing down through the enemy. It’s great to see that the developers thought through what the controller could bring to the game, rather than just keeping it the same control scheme as the last generation versions.
Yet despite its use of the new control scheme the whole thing does feel extremely last generation. The previously mentioned bland areas and dodgy AI along with recycled bosses could be forgivable if they looked pretty, but they don’t. The story is incredibly dull, even if it does have some amusing moments of dialogue. There’s a part halfway through the game which lets you choose where to go next, but there’s no way to really know what will be in each location. This doesn’t add mystery, it just seems like the developers thought “what can we do to make the game more interesting?”
It would seem they thought about this after they had finished building most of the game too, and it really shows. The chapter numbers jump all over the place as you go from area to area, proving that there must’ve been an order to witness these parts at some point. These areas are also the weakest areas in the game and reek of filler. For a game that can be finished in about 6 hours to have so much feeling like filler is not good.
Onechanbara Z2: Chaos is a fun game, which is at its best in closed in situations with a horde of enemies. If it was releasing as a budget title its shortcomings would be more forgivable, but as a game retailing at around £30 it’s hard to ignore its failures. The graphics, AI and level design are for the most part poor and it has an incredibly short campaign. There’s replayability in going for high scores and playing through harder difficulties, but most will play this once and probably not want to go back. When a price drop occurs and you have a craving for a 3D hack and slash adventure maybe give it a shot, but until then it’s hard to recommend the game to anyone that isn’t already a fan of the series.