Onee Chanbara Origin is a repetitive and short hack-and-slash game that gives on the sensation of playing through a B-movie, in both good ways and bad. While I can’t recommend the game to most people, if renting was still a thing, that would be the way to go about playing this game.
Onee Chanbara Origin
Developer: Tamsoft
Price: $60
Platform: PS4
MonsterVine was supplied with a PS4 code for review
Few games have as unique a concept as Onee Chanbara Origin. Bikini-clad zombie slayers running around Japan equipped with various katana is certainly a distinct and strange idea. As someone who loves strange stuff, I had to check it out. While it’s impressive that the game adheres to its B-movie tone so well, that’s unfortunately about all it has going for it.
In Onee Chanbara Origin you play as Aya, a young swordswoman who is searching for her father and step-sister following the murder of her step-mother. The world is filled with undead zombies, which Aya slays while communicating with the mysterious Lei (or Rei, the game seems to mix the names up.) Aya eventually teams up with her sister Saki in order to find their father and avenge their mother. The story is delivered through very clunky dialogue and is filled with nonsensical moments and barely explained twists. It feels a lot like a classic B-movie, filled to the brim with silly nonsense, blood, and suggestive themes. This can be a positive if you’re down with this tone, but its short length combined with the generally unremarkable plot make it hard to recommend otherwise.
The gameplay is fairly basic for a hack-and-slash game. There are two attack buttons, a parry button, and a dodge button. You can power up into two different forms once you get enough enemy blood on you, which each have their own bonuses and stat boosts. You can play as both Aya and Saki, who admittedly feel quite different, but even alternating between them on the fly doesn’t keep the game from feeling like a slog once you hit the halfway point.
“The voice acting is fittingly hammy, jumping between melodramatic shouting and overly serious delivery of silly lines.“
There are 25 chapters, which all start to blend together pretty quickly. There are a few different locations, but the combination of repetitive gameplay and various stages based on streets and sewers makes it feel like only a few long segments. Enemies get stronger, but the manner of battling them never changes. You just attack and attack until they die, with the occasional parry or weapon swap thrown in. It’s fun at first, but it gets old very fast.
I like the new visual style for Origin, and the blood effects are suitably over-the-top. The voice acting is fittingly hammy, jumping between melodramatic shouting and overly serious delivery of silly lines. Further adding to the B-movie charm is the very inconsistent lip-syncing. Characters cut each other off to the point where I could almost confuse Origin with Sonic Adventure 2. On the other hand, sometimes lines were too short and led to five seconds of silent lip-flapping after a line was done.
The Final Word
Onee Chanbara Origin is a repetitive hack-and-slash game that would be a fun rental at best. The story is nonsensical, the gameplay is shallow, and the dialogue is all over the place. It’s fun in a B-movie sort of way, but that appeal isn’t enough to make the game worth buying for most.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
