ONINAKI

I went into ONINAKI expecting Tokyo RPG Factory's usual brand of melancholy-tinged comfort food, and what I got instead was something considerably darker and more philosophically pointed than either I Am Setsuna or Lost Sphear ever tried to be. The premise alone earns it serious attention from anyone who cares about worldbuilding: in Kagachi's society, mourning the dead is literally illegal, because grief is what traps wandering souls in the purgatorial Beyond and warps them into monsters. That is a genuinely unsettling foundation for an RPG, and for the first half of the game the narrative leans hard into the implications, examining the ethics of forced reincarnation through a rotating cast of side stories. The writing does not flinch at suicide, at impossible choices, or at the kind of grief that hollows people out. For a studio-tier budget game from a Square Enix subsidiary, that level of thematic ambition is worth acknowledging. Kagachi himself is the frustrating centerpiece of all this. He starts gruff, stays gruff, and rarely evolves in the ways you want a protagonist to when the story around him is asking genuinely hard questions. Where the narrative earns real emotion is through the Daemons, the lost souls Kagachi bonds with for combat. Each Daemon carries a full personal history unlocked through skill tokens, and spending those tokens to watch backstory vignettes is the best thing in the game. Characters like Aisha (big sword, tragic arc) or Dia (gunfighter, more tragic arc) are more interesting than the main cast, and discovering their stories while simultaneously leveling up their skill trees gives the progression loop its only real hook past hour ten. You can equip up to four Daemons and swap between them in real time during fights, which is the system doing its absolute best work. Combat is where consensus fractures, and I land mostly on the skeptical side. The action RPG pivot from the studio's turn-based roots sounds exciting on paper, but in practice the movement feels sluggish and the dodge window is punishing in a way that reads less like Dark Souls intentionality and more like animation budget. You cannot dodge or heal mid-attack, recovery frames are long, and the enemy roster recycles aggressively across the entire game length. The Daemon matchup system, where certain spirits are stronger against specific enemy types, adds a layer of strategy that the game then undercuts by making normal difficulty too forgiving to require you to actually use it. Boss encounters drag through oversized health bars rather than clever design. The combat is not broken. It is just never as satisfying as the Daemon system beneath it promises. The final third is where ONINAKI most visibly runs out of steam. What starts as a focused, morally uncomfortable story collapses into a string of exposition dumps and padding that several reviewers flagged, and they were right to. There were multiple points where the game felt like it was signing off, only to keep going. That structural looseness hurts a narrative that genuinely earned its emotional weight in the middle chapters. The visual presentation is stronger than the budget implies, with a painterly contrast between the muted Living World and the sickly, atmospheric Beyond doing real work to sell the setting. The score, however, is largely forgettable, which is a shame given how much the game leans on its mood. The audience for ONINAKI is specific: RPG players who prioritize worldbuilding and thematic weight over responsive combat, who can tolerate repetitive enemy encounters if the story in between is doing something interesting, and who will not bounce off a slow-building protagonist. If you have finished everything Nier Automata had to say about machine consciousness and want something that asks similarly heavy questions about death and memory but with a lighter systems footprint, ONINAKI is the underseen game for that mood. Just go in knowing the back half will test your patience more than your build.

Monika · Scout Team

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