Onee Chanbara ORIGIN

Onee Chanbara Origin exudes B Movie energy in its every element, giving players a quick, aggressive, fun, and ridiculous action game to work through.

Onee Chanbara Origin is a serviceable remake of a couple classic PS2 titles. Developer Tamsoft does a great job giving the games a visual makeover and a much more modern feel. Combat is solid, though a bit basic at times. The experience is also bogged down at times by some performance problems. That aside, and Onee Chanbara is a worthwhile remake of a fun and unique story.

Onee Chanbara Origin is a hack-and-slash that does nothing more than any other hack-and-slash available. It’s best moments are the fluid and fast action when you’re cutting through hordes of enemies at a smooth frame rate with oceans of blood spraying all over. The series seems to be having an identity crisis about how it wants to continue. It needs to make a choice, keep the bikinis and have a bit of more campy fun with these characters, or lose them entirely and create a more polished action experience.

For players willing to put in the time to learn its subtleties, Onee Chanbara Origin has great combat, and sundering my way through crowds of zombies simply never got old. That said, there’s just not enough here to make it feel like a complete experience. While the game certainly displays everything that made the franchise into such a long-running success, I can’t help but feel that this anniversary celebration should have offered more to its fans.

While there’s a chance you can’t play it without fiddling with things, there’s a fun game in here. It’s expensive, with far too much DLC, but it’s fun.

The basic hack-and-slash formula it has seems fun, and you can understand why this went on to spawn sequels and so forth. Sure, it’s schlocky cheesecake action, but that’s exactly what it wants to be and that’s to its credit. Alas… I can’t really recommend this game because those technical issues are notable. They’re not “render the game unplayable” bad, although the experience was probably diminished for me. But for all I know I wasn’t the unlucky one but one of the lucky ones. I want to like this game. I repeatedly come close to liking this game. And I’m probably rating it highly given the technical issues. But those technical issues mean that for any and all of its virtues, the game ultimately fails that basic test of “is this fully playable.” If the issues are fixed in a launch patch, toss on another point to the score.