Onechanbara: the boy-trap XD

: lol okay so I managed to finally get Onechanbara last night for the first time ever and here's my thoughts:

This game is clearly a boy-trap, it's oriented toward a male player. The game starts with the main character Aya found in a shower and her half-sister Saki (who I prefer most to play as instead) spots a zombie apocalypse on the news and rushes in to tell Aya about it ASAP. Won't go any further there though it didn't show exactly everything but yes, there's more than enough teasing clearly to arouse a boy on that part lol   

And yes I'm a girl who gotten this game and clearly get a hint about those kinds of things, I'm a tough audience toward that. I got it out of curiosity about how the game plays, not that stuff. Anyway, enough of that nonsense.  

Now onward to the part about why I got it anyway regardless: the gameplay.
Onechanbara is a bit "meh" in my opinion; a 50/50 to rating in my terms. Excluding what one would think of why a girl would clearly drop ratings on this game, which is exactly not why I do here, there's gripes about it excluding the explained-above factor, but let's take this in standard order.

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The good things first so far:
It's not laggy, and there's a co-op mode even in story mode. The game keeps asking me at some starts of a stage "You can allow a second player to join. Would you like to switch to co-op mode or stick to 1P-only?" except a few rare points in which Aya on St.4 and St.6 is separated from her sister Saki; these parts are 1P-only stages. As another factor, this game allows more than just Aya & Saki playable, there's Anna the ZPF forces agent (sorry spelling!) who uses guns, and a few others unlockable after her at points and even bosses can be used as DLC. Further to that, the game plays like Chaos Legion; hack & slash over hundreds of enemies buzzing around the place, but as said, there's a 2P possibility! If not doing 2P-play, then the game already has a Tag-out feature anyway. There's even trapped fields which a mass wave of zombies must be destroyed before items appear like in C-L, too.

Now, the cons (bad parts) of the game:
There's other annoyances in this game to me (excluding the parts that gets other women sick of it on sight) and those are so far-
The camera control for one. It's classicly used via Right Analog stick but the control of the camera is annoying. Hardly moves so it's hard to see what's behind the heroine(s) and they can easily be ambushed if enemies are very aggressive in large mobs. I usually have to run in one way while trying to fight camera to turn in another way to see where I want to go when having to turn around quickly. Another problem is that there is no info about the controls, so if one did not get a manual of the game via hard copy, it will be a "find out from button exploration" kind of game, and here's what I found out the hard way by the time it was too late (sorry will use playstation controls reference since more familiar to them):

Left Analog stick: move (common),
Right Analog stick: camera (also natural),
Square (Blue-X): attacking (naturally),
Triangle (Y): kick (can combo),
Circle (B): ???
X (A): Jump,
Start: Pause (a natural),
R1 (RB): Lock-on to enemy/boss and switch to fighting mode while held down (can do more combos and etc.),
L1 (LB): Reload/clean blade of stained blood (Info on this soon!),
L2 (LT): Switch weapon style (works with others except for Saki, this does nothing for her),
R2 (RT): Tag Out,
Up: Taunt (lol),
Down: Status Screen,
Left: Area Map screen,
Right: Adjust minimap radar (small, large, off),
Select: Item menu (!)

....so there we have it. By the time I found out how to use items, Aya was already dying from...... another major annoyance in this game;
Unlike as seen in Chaos Legion/DMC/Dynasty Warriors as for when you are supposed to beat enemies up to become more powerful to activate your DT/berserk mode/Musou Drive, in Onechanbara going berserk from mass killing is actually a bad thing! I guess this is one thing to admit that your protagonist still has a bit of sanity on one end in which if she kills too much then it will drive her crazy till she dies; this is called "Rampage Mode" the good thing is that your cat's attack power and overall speed increases immensely with a chance to instant kill any weaklings who are not bosses 100% of the time on a single swipe of sword which reflects stats the same like Ivis (girls having Super-Armor at the cost of something important), but there's one huge problem: at the cost of her life diminishing away! The only way to stop this is to find a Goddess Statue or use a fragment. Another very irritating factor of the game is that there is at least one kind of enemy which I have yet to destroy: Blood Mist. How the hell am I to kill this thing?! Attacking it directly is stupid as that severely stains the protagonists' swords and rapidly increases her hate factor, attacking it in berserk mode doesn't help the matter either as it's immune to instant kills... the only thing I could do is run the hell away!   

http://www.animemaru.com/square-enix-revises-marketing-for-bravely-default/ I'll just leave this here

“Hell, even Final Fantasy XIV would have sold well if we slapped some titties on the cover.”

: Barely works, as they say. Usually a first attention-grabber then found out later not to be as good as one expected after. I've yet to see something of that effect as a start end with a still great-standing status.

To be honest though back on topic of Onechanbara for here at the moment, the game isn't as bad as some people say it is. It's not worth calling a "rage quit" type actually and it does have a fair 2P play mode after all. Just tried it yesterday at least once and it does work even locally so yes as I said it's fairly decant except for the in-game elements to trap a male audience, lame camera issues, those pompous blood mist zombies, and the slow-to-recover problems from being blown back by bosses. 

The rough translations during cutscenes also is a bit of a take-away; I can clearly see some errors here and there personally, but that can be excused because it was originally supposed to be in Japan and yet it has a western release as well. This is excusable.

I don't have any X-Box systems, so the only Oneechanbara I have is the Japanese PSP version. Yes, Saki looks nice, but the game play seems to have a high learning curve (can't get past first wyvern boss). Apparently, I've heard this issue is only for the PSP version, though. Other than that, the only complaint is that because of Japanese age rating, the blood's color can be changed but never to red. Ironically, changing it to white looks like the age rating was jacked up even higher.

MidbossVyers wrote:--  Ironically, changing it to white looks like the age rating was jacked up even higher.

: Stupid me for not mentioning this but yup... I can tell where THAT goes on the ratings as you said it.