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.
