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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