Onechanbara Origin

Tamsoft's quirky zombie-filled action franchise is back with a remake of the first 2 games so get ready to revisit Onechanbara's origins.

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, Onee Chanbara is a worthwhile remake of a fun and unique story.

The Onee Chanbara franchise is a long-running series of hack n’ slash games developed by Tamsoft and published by D3. They started way back in the PS2 era as part of a series of Japanese-exclusive budget titles called Simple 2000. It’s as simple and shallow as a game can be, being all about murdering countless amounts of zombies while controlling a bikini-clad samurai chick wearing a cowboy hat. This franchise spawned tons of sequels, but it had little support here in the West… until no...

Onee Chanbara Origin isn't a great game, but it has much more fun combat and smoother visuals than previous entries in the series.

Onee Chanbara Origin is what it is: a remake of a couple of simple and repetitive action games that largely rely on titillation and buckets of gore to keep players’ eyes glued to the screen. Dig beneath its shallow exterior, however, and you’ll find a combat system that’s surprisingly rewarding when the camera isn’t working against you. It’s just a shame that there’s not much content to it. It’s hard to recommend Onee Chanbara Origin at its full price unless you’re really keen to hack and slash zombies as a bikini-clad badass. When that price drops a little, though, it’s worth jumping on if ac...

Onee Chanbara Origin remains a cathartic, bloodthirsty, and goofy bit of chaos, whose aesthetic charms have been boosted thanks to Tamsoft’s excellent audio/visual upgrade. Unfortunately, the passage of time has somewhat dulled Origin’s gameplay, which has been far superseded by other franchises. Offering a short campaign, above-average action, and a slim package, Onee Chanbara Origin is for franchise fans only – and not at its $60 asking price.

while I had a fun time mowing down the Undead, I wouldn’t really say Onee Chanbara Origin is a great game. The characters are shallow, obviously designed to be something nice to look at, which doesn’t sit well in a modern context. The story doesn’t make much sense and the small bits of lore the writers tried to toss in doesn’t make an impact on the actual gameplay experience. Onee Chanbara Origin remains stuck in the early 2000s, unable to make the transition to modern audiences with higher expectations.

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.

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.

While the gameplay itself is competent, this is a short, shallow game with very little enemy variety, poor level design, and some egregious price-gouging.