Onee Chanbara Origin

I've done everything the game has to offer, such as beating the story on normal, hard, beast and berserk. All the bonus missions, every quest including no damage taken ones and reaching floor 151 in survival mode. As with all my reviews, I'm not a very hard person to please. My score is a solid 10 / 10 with only a few minor gripes that don't hurt enough to subtract points in my opinion.
Onee Chanbara Origins is one of my favorite hack and slash games. I grew up playing Senran Kagura series on the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4 as the closest related games. While Senran focuses on a large cast of characters with varied but not as good move sets, Onee Chanbara focuses on 3 characters with very refined move sets and a whole lot of variety in the combos you can build.
The game feels infinitely re-playable to me because it encourages you to get better and better with the cool system. You usually fight at normal speed, but with the cool system you can get into a fast paced rhythm that increases your damage and speeds up your attacks for timing them opposed to button mashing.
Constantly pulling off these stylish combos gives you spectacular showcases of cinematic fighting as you tear through zombies and splatter blood everywhere. Killing lots of enemies charges a berserk mode that increases your damage, and if you fully charge it again before it expires you can berserk a second time for even more damage and the ability to heal yourself when attacking. In order to keep you playing aggressively your health will drain in this form. The more kills you get, the longer it lasts, so you can really abuse it in survival mode.
The graphics are outstanding, I'm glad they have finally decided on a really good looking art style. Previous games in the series have been kind of ugly in my opinion, but visuals have never stopped me from enjoying a game that plays good. I consider them to be the cherry on top of the ice cream. Voice acting is great. Sound design and music also amazing. And some of those battle songs can really get you pumped up to perfect those combos. Enemies are varied enough to make you think about certain encounters.
Enemies feature regular zombies, riot shield zombies invulnerable from the front (can be instant killed with a special attack.), police with pistols and shotguns, mud men that can only be killed with a special attack or parry, aggressive packs of dogs, Elite versions of zombies that can't be staggered, knife and mini gun wielding soldiers that don't stagger as easily and will combo attack you back. Also, big and tanky enemies that can knock you down easily. The bosses are all very well designed. 95% of the time if you get hit in this game, it's fair due to telegraphed attacks. And to make sure you're really paying attention, some attacks are delayed or speed up to catch you off guard.
There is a shop with lots of items to buy to give you minor boosts. From healing, revives, and even an expensive temporary invulnerability charm. One item you have to parry mud men to acquire. Which when used increases your berserk meter, but you cannot buy it. I have no problem working for in game money to buy stuff, but a lot of rings are costing 500,000 thousand to 1,000,000 million in game money when runs average me 18 thousand.
For those of you who have beat the game, I found a trick to grind money faster. Boot up level 1 on beast mode, equip the "Hits" and "Berserk" rings. Now work on doing your 300 hits quest, enemies take a ridiculously long time to die making it easy to go that high constantly. Reach stage 2 of berserk as much as you can and let it expire. Because 2 achievements require you to do this 100 times. You end up killing around 5 birds with 1 stone. About 30 minutes of this netted me over 3 million money from reaching 999 combos over and over.
I assume the rings are so dreadful to obtain because most act like equip-able cheat codes. (Which don't get me wrong, is awesome.) From healing yourself on hits, near infinite special meter recharge, fast berserk, and exp + money boosting, they make a game play difference. There are a few boring ones like attack, health, and defense increases, but hey, better we have them than not. My favorite combination to use has been the Rings of Technique, Bloodsucking, and Xtasy. Play the game, you'll see what they do.
There are many quests to do. A lot of them are actually challenging. Such as, not getting hit even once and clearing high floors in survival. I felt really satisfied to earn these because I had to constantly improve. I learned attack patterns, how to better utilize my dodges and invincibility frames from skills, and how to maximize my damage to stun and deal even more damage. My final nod goes out to the plenty of fan service. What more can you ask for? Hot girls, exceptional action and game play, lots of blood and gore. I need another entry of this franchise honestly.
I haven't said anything about the story because it's not that strong. It does attempt to get you to care a bit, but ultimately it feels like the problem is presented just as fast as it's solved and not too much depth or interaction really happens. We know some basic stuff and bits of their personalities, but at the end of the day it's just a revenge trip and not much else. I don't think any of the games in this series were ever that heavily story focused, so I didn't really care that much.
I was here to slash and look at eye candy, left satisfied. Little disappointing the cast was smaller and we didn't get to play as some of the human bosses with move sets on par with the player characters. But oh well. While very unlikely to happen, I still hope Eva comes as dlc one day. She was a playable character in a previous entry. Speaking of move sets, I noticed something a little strange. Aya only has 1 cool finisher, and it's good so it's not a problem. But Saki has a different animation for every enemy type. It's really cool, especially karate chopping zombie dogs in half. But I'm curious why Aya doesn't.
I only have a few negatives to say. Number 1 being I hate when games give you time waster achievements. You must buy all rings, and as you've seen from before. I've beaten the story 4 times start to finish with over 20 stages and didn't even have enough money to get half of the rings. The 2nd being the camera and lock on is really bad. For whatever reason the lock on decides to randomly target some enemy far off on the other side of the map instead of the group your already fighting. And it tends to zoom in extremely high up obstructing your view against some of the bigger bosses.
You can't even see yourself anymore, only hear the sounds of your character attacking when this happens. Moving camera around with the mouse does not let you turn majority of the time, you have to use the keyboard. Lastly, you can't remap all the buttons you'd like. I wish I could pause with escape like every other game and run with shift. But no, not allowed here. Overlooking these minor annoyances, I still strongly recommend playing this game.
Edit 11/27/2023: Improved paragraph structure and fixed some typos.

i expected dumb button mashing with girls in bikinis slashing zombies in a pool of blood... would have been totally enough for me. what i got instead was a super fun and deep action game with lots of mechanics about girls in bikinis slashing zombies in a pool of blood. HIGHLY recommend haha great game!

A much improved and localized version of the budget-priced Simple 2000 classics. Devil May Cry but hornier and more anime.
It plays better than you'd expect, and it is some good dumb fun. I wouldn't really suggest picking it up at full price, but this does frequently show up in bundles and deeply discounted. This is still a bargain bin title at its heart, so you should buy it at a bargain bin price.

It starts off really really rough. but for some reason after you unlock saki the game gets absurdly better as you can cancel animations by sister switching™️ and Saki has the most satisfying punch girl moveset i've ever seen.
didnt think it would hit the parry umami levels of other character actions but if this game had a boss rush i would absolutely be around for it.
If we ever get more games like these i'll keep an eye out, nice job onechanbara team!

The story is wack, the levels are pretty bland (if not nostalgic for fans of the original games), the lip-syncing is some of the worst I've ever seen, and yet I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game. The combat is surprisingly deep and extremely fun. Just don't pay $60 for it, wait for a sale. The main story only took me 7 hours so it's rather short. If you want to turn your brain off and slay hundreds of zombies this game is a fantastic way to do just that.

Worth it on sale.
Game is short, even on Hard. You know what it is already - a hack & slash with waves of bloody zombies (& ladies). On the surface, the combat is pretty satisfying with flashy animations, cool camera, hit stops, etc. On mechanics side, you got basic stuffs like parry, (perfect) dodge, stun, special skills, special forms. But two notable mechanics are dodge offset like Bayonetta, where you can continue your combo after a dodge or a parry; and switch characters on-the-fly during a dead animation to smoothen the combat flow.
Nice hack & slash game. I like it.

nice reboot, but too short for the price. buy this game when it is on sale.