ONI: Road to be the Mightiest Oni stumbles, even with its gorgeous artwork

One of Japan’s most famous tales is the legend of Momotaro: a boy who came to Earth on a giant peach who, together with his animal companions (a monkey, a pheasant and a dog), sets out for the island of Onigashima to defeat the demons.

“ONI: Road to be the Mightiest Oni” takes advantage of this premise and in a creative way manages to make a game with beautiful art that at times seems to have come out of a painting.

ONI: The way to be the strongest

Here you control Kuuta, the only survivor of the demon clan of Onigashima, who ends up escaping and going to the island of Kisejima to get stronger and become the strongest. In the meantime, the character will interact with others and make friends and see old allies again. It’s a simple premise but it works at first, as a promise that something bigger is ahead.

And there is a certain charisma in the characters, which as the player progresses in the game, reveal more information about themselves and increase the bonds of friendship. And the characters designs help a lot.

I also take the opportunity to say that “ONI” has three manga chapters (titled ONI: Road to be the mightiest Oni Zero) that explain a little more about the events that precede the game.

The gameplay is very simple: you have a weapon, special skills and the possibility to dodge and control your companion, here called Kazemaru. The combos are just pressing the attack button and only change with the change of weapon. There are also other abilities for the player to reach inaccessible places at the beginning and also a mount to speed up the exploration of the island of Kisejima.

Repetition haunts you

If, on the one hand, we have beautiful scenarios, simple gameplay that works and charismatic characters, on the other hand, we have problems that can drive players away.

When you arrive on the island, you are greeted with a soundtrack that is different. If Momotaro’s tale is something very old, the soundtrack does the opposite and puts on songs with very current styles, as if they were wanting to create a dissonance.

The idea is excellent, but the result is songs that are repeated and end up sometimes forcing the player to reduce the volume of the songs at the time of exploration. I didn’t notice this problem in battle moments, but the fact that the player spends more time exploring than battling enemies makes him lose part of the game experience.

And speaking of battles, another downside is that the game places them in instances and not on its open map. And unfortunately there aren’t any big variations, it all boils down to entering missions and attacking enemies until you defeat them all.

“ONI” even tries to place enemies that have a different attack pattern, a larger size or that have some resistance to reduce this repetition, but unfortunately it fails. Except for boss fights, which offer a little more challenge and get out of that fate. This repetition, of course, can end up making the experience of a live stream a little tiring, both for the streamer and for their audience, who will not see much news during the adventure.

Here it is up to the streamer to try more personal ways of interacting with their audience, so they won’t lose interest in the transmission.

Technical problems

All the problems I’ve reported can be relative from player to player, but one of the game’s biggest flaws is in the technical part.

I played the PC version and the game itself doesn’t present any challenge to run, but there is a very serious problem with the PC version that is not present in the console versions, at least not in the same severity.

The game easily runs at high frame rates, but there is a problem with the background scenery that when moving the camera turns out to be quite annoying, as if there is no stability in the game’s frame rate.

The developers have released updates so that it is possible to limit the frame rate but none of the options actually solve the problem. Even using the “vertical synchronization” option only exacerbates this issue and all of this can even alienate players, streamers, who will have greater problems with their transmissions, and even the audience, who may end up not liking what they see so much.

In a live stream, however, the game has the potential to engage the audience for its beautiful art and the similarity of the visual style with other famous games, but unfortunately the game only has English, Japanese and Chinese localization.

Katsutoshi