Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Unlike the last couple of games to enter this intense period of scrutiny, I wasn't ready to give up on Oni the first time it annoyed me with bad game design choices - which, I should state, are single instances of bad design, not that Oni itself is badly designed on the whole, a minor but important distinction - or even the second or third time. Oni has far better (as in, more responsive and intuitive) controls than either Nightshade or Headhunter, despite being an earlier game, and I was starting to enjoy its plot about a cop with purple hair in a sci-fi world influenced by one of those "How To Draw Japanimation" art books from the 1990s, sort of like how Cuphead was influenced by a very era-specific strain of artistic endeavor. (The characters definitely look anime enough in cutscenes and in still splash images, but when you get to the portraits... well. It took me back to middle-school art class in a flash.)

Oni has a lot of shared DNA with Headhunter, insofar as there's a certain amount of freedom in how you choose to take on its various stages. You can try to be sneaky, using a crouch walk to get close to enemies quietly before using a suplex-style move to take them out of the fight. You can run right up to them and beat them down with a fairly sophisticated martial arts melee system, in which throws and evades are as useful as a reliable three punch combo attack. You can also try to eliminate enemies from a distance with firearms, which you can use while strafing, though you burn through a finite stock of ammo fairly quickly. The game would prefer you vary all three approaches, I suspect, because some are effective than others depending on the present conditions. A large part of the gameplay revolves around following your compass to computer consoles and stairwells, and then following the next marker that pops up. Without maps, running around looking for these markers is not necessarily as straightforward (or as exciting) as you might prefer, but it works as a gameplay conceit - and as a delivery method for waves of new guards to dispatch however you wish.

Unfortunately, the game makes a few... interesting choices with regards to its challenge level. It'll auto-save at regular intervals, even allowing you to go back to earlier auto-saves in the level if needs must. What it doesn't do is heal you between dying and restarting at the last save point, so if you reach the next checkpoint with no health items and a smidgen of HP left you'll either need to get lucky or consider reloading further back to avoid constant heartbreak. I very nearly quit the game at the end of the first mission, which is a timed sequence that forces you to quickly move a crane to block the egress of a truck full of illegal weaponry, because each time I began I had a slither of health left and two or three guards bearing down on me, with a handful more between myself and the crane controls. On the other hand, you get enough health items from enemies that as long as you're careful around those with guns it shouldn't be too hard to survive from one checkpoint to the next. However, it seems on later missions these checkpoints get further and further apart. The third mission in particular, which begins with a tough boss fight - the first of the game - and then has you complete the rest of the map with what little health you have remaining plus whatever hypo sprays you can find to top it up with, while also holding the next checkpoint after the one immediately following the boss until after you've climbed three floors full of enemies. It's what's generally referred to as "a dick move" in the parlance of professional level design. As a result, I sped rapidly towards that terminal point of "I don't want to play this any more" despite my best intentions.

Outside of difficulty concerns like this, which are unfortunately legion in older games and hardly something with which to tar and feather Oni in particular, I liked Oni's combat and exploration even if the gameplay cycle is a tad on the repetitive side. The brawling's a lot of fun compared to the gunplay, which makes it a bummer on those many occasions where a guy has a gun and is on the opposite of the room and makes it clear he has no interest in putting it away to take you on mano-a-manga. Platforming's kinda bad too, but the game doesn't seem to have enough of it to be that much of a bother. There are certainly aspects of the game that are defensible, and it's still fairly distinct from anything coming out now, but I think you need that nostalgia factor to really want to come back to it in 2017. Again, when Metal Gear Solid 3 is the bar for this particular brand of game to pass to have any shot on making it onto the shelf, it's a hard ask. (I'm thinking that, instead of burning through all my stealth infiltration games in one fell swoop, I should probably try a different genre next week.)

Result: Eliminated.

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Don't forget, folks:

This was a Bungie game, published by Rockstar.

T'was a strange time.

I just revisited this game a month ago, since I couldn't remember if I had actually completed it or not when I played it in 2001. I could only remember that the game's mix of melee and gunplay was kind of novel, the anime stuff was weak, and that the game was rife with frustrating difficulty spikes. With some determined effort, I completed the game this time. Like the similarly anime-inspired Shogo, which I played through one year ago, Oni has some decent concepts behind it (such as the robust melee combat), but the game as it stands is a sloppy, frustrating mess.

The game is full of cheese and not just due to the lame writing and anime-imitation art style. Enemies with ranged weapons have fast reaction speeds, high accuracy, and can sometimes spawn into the map along your flanks without warning. They're happy to camp at long range and snipe you (sometimes with high-damage hitscan sniper rifles) while you have to run headlong through their gunfire, unarmed, to try to melee them or evade them. Other times, an enemy will surprise you by opening a door near you and instantly unloading an entire uzi into you while the door opening animation has barely finished playing. Deaths that border on feeling helpless or unfair are not infrequent.

Then there's the inconsistently-spaced checkpoints, as mentioned above, that don't refill your health, paired with level design that sometimes drowns you in health powerups and other times absolutely starves you of them. And there's no manual save to give the player any control over the uneven pacing. The levels are mostly composed of barren, cavernous, uninteractive hallways and rooms. The gameplay loop is running around fighting all the enemies, scrounging for occasional powerups, and hunting for computer terminals to use to open the door to the next portion of the level. There are so many computer terminals, and they all seem to turn one of three red lights green over a locked door before the door will open. And, to top it off, there are some timed sequences with invisible timers.

Finally, there are the boss fights, which are some of the game's weakest moments. There two patterns of boss fight: a standard one-on-one duel using guns and melee or a 'puzzle' fight where you run around a circular room and repeatedly activate 4 computer terminals while dodging hazards like laser beams that sweep the room. Neither is at all fun or satisfying, but at least the puzzle fights are relatively short and easy. If you happen to have extra health going into one, you can even just run through most of the hazards and soak up the damage while rapidly activating the computers to end the fight in a matter of seconds. The duel fights are longer and more annoying, and I found myself settling into using cheese tactics to trivialize them. I found that running in a tight circle around the boss would lock them into a chasing animation instead of attacking, and since you always run faster than them, you can always catch up to them and then just use a running throw or a jump kick on them. Repeat a couple dozen times until they're dead. Even if you decide to fight fair, the bosses won't reciprocate. You start the fight, as with every checkpoint, with whatever health and items you happened to have on you when you first got there, so you'd better hope you stockpiled your healing hypos, since there are no means of healing during the fight. Meanwhile, the bosses naturally have far more health and deal far more damage than you do, with both melee and guns, but some can also go invisible, run away across the map, and heal themselves back up for free anytime they want, which makes these miserable battles of attrition every bit as irritating as you'd expect.

As for the game's few strengths, I think the melee combat system is at the top, since it gives you a good quantity and variety of moves that are generally fun to employ, though it parcels them out at a pace that I think is too slow. The throws are especially satisfying to use on enemies. It's fun to throw enemies into others to knock them all down or to throw an enemy off a cliff for an instant kill. The guns are relatively powerful, but not very satisfying to actually shoot. I appreciated that ammo was quite scarce, since that made the guns more like a temporary powerup rather than a fully reliable alternative to using the more interesting melee combat. I also appreciate that the story made some effort to make itself more engaging by having a bizarre dream sequence level, even though, like in Max Payne 1, it was not actually fun to play.

Overall, Oni strikes me as a game that probably fell victim to many of the same pitfalls as Shogo: a team of naively optimistic Western developers who saw the appeal and success of Japanese digital popculture at the time and managed to convince business people to give them some money to try to ride that wave. But translating that intention into a good game proved harder than it looked, with their modest budget and experience coming up short. Like Shogo, Oni is a half-baked game made by people who probably had their hearts in the right place, but it ultimately fails to offer a worthwhile experience on its own merits or to live up to the source material that inspired it.