Oniken: Unstoppable Edition

A love letter to old NES-era games, Oniken promises a hardcore experience where you WILL fail. However, I found that that failure comes from poor design rather than any sort of actual challenge. A huge part of succeeding at Oniken is memorization, knowing item, enemy, and hazard placement is mandatory if you want to complete a stage. And to beat the many bosses requires you spend time memorizing their attack patterns and when to be aggressive and when not to be. The problem with Oniken is that you pretty much have to know the level like the back of your hand, taking any damage is damning and could potentially cost you a life due to how powerful the berserk power-up is. A power-up that could become inaccessible if you take damage as it requires two bars of your sword power-up of which you can have a maximum of three, (two the first time you pick up the sword item and a third if you pick up another). It is possible to win without the berserk mode, (I've beaten the game without once using it), but again, you must know the levels by heart. This leads to the second problem of Oniken, the level design. Enemy and hazard placement can be at times sadistic, there is a specific section in mission 5 where an enemy blocks your path while you are on a small moving platform. This enemy will block any attack until he lowers his shield, at which point you have to feverishly mash the attack button in the hopes of taking him and his projectile in one go, failure and you'll almost surely take damage and possibly fall off the platform. This type of enemy appears again in mission 6, again placed in a position that requires deft hands and button mashing to avoid any damage and hopefully reach the boss with berserk mode in hand. There's also the problem of hitboxes, there are several times when a jump would fail, the character's sprite clipping through the edge of a platform that should most definitely have been successful. As well as taking damage from touching enemies that barely scrapped the character and in some cases looked as if they had not even met. It's as if the character's is tiny when it comes to platforming but huge when it comes to taking a hit. There were also technical problems, I relished the opportunity to use my arcade stick for another retro game but found that inputs would not register from button presses. This was a shock as my stick has been known to read inputs from just resting my fingers on top of the buttons, I would need to slam down on the button just to go from a short hop to the proper jump I desired. All in all Oniken is a decent enough NES-esque game, but the difficulty came from poor design and controls than actual well planned level and boss design. If your itching for another hardcore game to add to your belt and have the time and patience to spend grinding away at memorizing patterns this game could be for you. But if you lack the time or aren't willing to put up with poor controller support or several frustrating and admittedly cheap deaths you're better off just ringing your local Gamestop for a copy of Battletoads.

Solid platformer. Quite difficult. Somewhat in the same line of Ninja Gaiden on the NES but without wall jumps.

This game is really a bad hardcore experience and I can clearly see that it was crafted to resemble an "old" experience in every way. And here is where the bad show up. This game doesn't simply base its experience upon your reflexes. Do not mistake me I'm almost thirthy years old and i had my share with hard games starting from my childhood. Like almost everyone here on GOG. But this game mix the good and the bad things of the old games failing miserably to appeal to new players. Why? Because a lot of times you will do again a level for just one reason. The traps positions, the enemy positions, the terrain position, everything is out here to kill you, a lot of times with instant kill due to the fact that every time you will be hit you will be moved one square back into a pit that cause instadeath. You will have no space to rely on your own way of doing things and jump on this obstacle. You will have to MEMORIZE it. As many of the old platformers of my era too. But are they remebered? Barely. Which old platform everyone play and like? The Metal Slug series. And exactly for one reason, and this was not the incredible number of weapon. Simply because at least it give to you the freedom to jump one centimeter to the right or to the left at your pleasure and fight the bosses in your own style with your fantasy, improving your fun and immersion. Not here. In the very early missions, exactly after the number 2, you will understand that you must repeat and repeat and repeat one stage, more than not you will repeat three stages in a row because you lost all your lives, and that's because some areas were designed to be a pain in your ass, giving you almost no chance to do wrong. Your only option is to exactly remember when and how to do things in the only space that the game give to you, equally to another player without any creativity. The skill in Oniken simply represent a challenge on who has the best musce memory in the fingertips, not who can best think under stress or react quickly. Some enemies are even designed with attacks that can't be avoided in any way so the real challenge with them will simply be to get with more health that you can in front of them and then smash the attack button as fast as you can. Even without any stress because you have already learned, the tenth time that you beat this ass****, that you will succeed or fail by looking at the amount of your health bar. The problem will be after them, when in the next stage to beat the level you will lose your last life due to the unfair terrain and respawning enemies and you will be doomed to do it again. Three stars and only because I'm one player pretty old compared to the standard nowadays, but if you are a young one consider it a two-star game unless you have some masochistic attraction to games that lack creativity and base themselves just on copying old gameplay mechanics, without even trying to improve the clearly bad things of the past era.

Let me start with the fact: there is a lot of 8 or 16 bit-like games. These are intend to bring back the feels of the classic titles. Oniken however a little different kind of game. Since all of these games are placing old styles into the modern possibilities, Oniken stays at the point that nothing more than a Nintendo Entertainment System game... and this is the greatest success I ever seen. Oniken not just a nostalgic copy, but a real retro game that was released in 2014. It exactly plays like as a NES game, and shares the same difficulty and tricks during play. Whenever the events of the story starts to break down a little, an epic twist (complete with an epic music) occurs to put you back to the horse. Simple: move, then slash, then move again, then jump, it is like this. You must watch out what you tries to take first, because as in many old games you can easily trapped at the wrong place causing powerful crossfire. I talked about the difficulty before, now let me explain it a little more. As you start the game there is a very simple and linear stage to stage saving with HP refil after every area of the actual stage. This is easy and very good for learning the game's tricks. Beating the game will unlock a "Hardcore" mode for not just hardcore fans. This mode could be called "original NES" mode. It removes the save at the end of the stages and the HP refil completely. You must finish the game without help, just like in the old days of Ninja Gaiden. Awesome if you ask me. The story is a realy retro cartridge story. Cyberpunk world, a little silly plot, and a lot of "an another threat appeared" scene. It is complete with the rythmic and totally fitting original 8 bit tunes. The epic moments always receive the well-deserved epic themes just to make you excited. For a closing line, Oniken is a style I totally missed even after playing on Shovel Knight, Rabi-Rabi, Shantae, Odallus and other titles. It is perfectly like a game that survived 1990.