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Onechanbara Z2: Chaos (PS4) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Friday 27 December, 2019 // I stopped playing this game on: Friday 10 January, 2020
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
January 10, 2020 05:35:19 PM
Weirdly, I ended up playing the entire campaign/story. This most mostly thanks to the sunk-cost fallacy, I was sure there were only X levels remaining, and I was wrong, but I had already played Z many levels, so why not keep on going because, surely, there are only X levels left. And so, 4-5 hours later, it was done. I was playing on the lower difficulty level, which is clearly not the level you're supposed to play at because, although I did get better at using different moves, the game wasn't that difficult for me to clear (one of the boss fights being the salient exception). That being said, the more I played the more depth I realized the game had (even if I didn't need to take advantage of that depth in order to succeed). Here's a few things I thought were really neat about the game: a. Although you only control 1 character, there are always 3 available and swapping between them at the right moment is really neat/fun - you get aextra buffs, damage etc. b. There's a meter that fills up and you then activate it for ALL of the characters to tap in and start attacking. You still control your main, and I think the others mostly target whatever you're going up against. It's a neat way to deal with really large mobs OR to efficiently bring down a boss. I couldn't think of another game that had something like this. Things I was confused by: a. I was about 2/3 through before I realized there were items you could use for stuff. Other than healing, it didn't seem like these were very important? b. You can also buy rings and equipment for buffs and such. However, I was not able to buy any! I'd select them in the menu and press "X" but nothing would happen. It wasn't until after I had finished that I realized that you had to select an item and then press "right" - the item was actually a bar you had to fill up! Sigh. I'm not sure what difference that would have made for me, but all the equipment slots now made sense. Sigh. My final thoughts are more genre-related. It's definitely a "B" game - production values and more (similar to the Earth Defence Force games). But the barely clothed protagonists and certain camera angles strongly indicate an interest in titillating the player. Would it be fair to think of this game as an exploitation game the same way there are exploitation films? Well, a quick trip to wikipedia reveals that there is a subgenre of exploitation called "Chanbara" films - which are loosely samurai movies but with added nudity etc. So, with this game called "Onechanbara ZII: Chaos" - it's clearly a "chanbara" game? So yes? It's an exploitation game? Hmm... this seems interesting!
December 28, 2019 08:22:30 PM
I wonder if there's such a thing as an exploitation game? Like the exploitation movies? I'm not sure what those are exactly other than then being B-movies with gratuitous violence and maybe some titillation? This game definitely would fit the bill. And, it's part of a long-running series AFAIK. It's fast, gory, and has way too many buttons for me to control, the graphics are decidedly last-gen. Oh, and the 4 female characters are scantily clad, and the camera often moves around so you can almost/sort of see things you shouldn't. I'm not sure how to think of it in terms of gameplay genre, perhaps it's a combo-based action brawler? It feels like a fighting game sometimes, 'cause there's all these bars that fill up and you can trigger ultimate attacks and such? It's kind of like Devil May Cry? But not that I have all that much experience with that one. I'm also reminded of the Dynasty Warriors games - simply because there are so many monsters spawning. I suspect I won't play this for too long, but for now I'm learning about a new series I wasn't familiar with, so I guess there's that...

Onechanbara Z2: Chaos (PS4)