Onee Chanbara Origin is a bit of a unique case to discuss as a game. In many ways it is perfectly serviceable – a game I had fun playing for the time I spent playing it. Is there any other metric to measure a game by, really? But by the same token, it is yet another third-person action game in a crowded genre space whose price point makes comparisons all but inevitable.

At its core Onee Chanbara Origin is a hack-and-slash action game which bills itself as a style-over-substance title. Aya wears a bikini and a ten-gallon hat into battle, and is there to splatter zombie brains all over the pavement with her trusty katana. There's no heavy-handed narrative to weigh you down either; the story is so paper-thin it can't even soak up the blood from the first ten minutes of gameplay. You know what you're here for, and that's cutting monsters into chunky giblets and doing sick flips. Obviously, as a remake of a game from 15 years ago, it is quite literally a throwback, but it is shot through with a sort of back-to-basics battle-brawler mindset that usually harkens back to a bygone era of gaming.

Mechanically it is not terribly complex but not mindlessly shallow either. You have a light attack and a heavy attack with the expected combo strings. There is a targeting system but you can just as easily free roam and battle when and where you'd like. You have a dodge button that can be used rapid-fire, and a block move that stuns enemies but if you whiff the timing it leaves you wide open for counter-attacks. Most of your weapons are melee options, but you have to “reload” them because they accumulate blood as you fight; by tapping a bumper you flick blood off and clear a portion of the meter. Even though this “reloading” takes time, it is significantly reduced if you do it mid-combo string, encouraging you to keep fighting.

There are also a few extra layers of complexity as the game progresses. If you stun enemies you can Cool Finish them, which is essentially a gory overkill that, depending on enemy type, may chain into others or even be necessary to defeat them. You have two “super” meters in the form of Berserk Mode and Xtatic mode. They are both triggered by being coated in the blood sprays of your enemies, eventually culminating in your character changing into a new visual style and having heightened attack damage; or in the case of Xtatic, greatly enhanced damage and lifesteal at the cost of constantly burning through your health. Weapon swapping is quick, and you can eventually switch characters on the fly. Switching characters can happen mid-combo and in fact is key to stringing together longer sequences on enemies.

The game is broken up into a series of chapters. Most chapters are relatively short – somewhere between five to twenty minutes to complete each. The levels are mostly corridors that lead to rooms where you get locked in and are forced to defeat every enemy before being able to move on. Occasionally there will be a boss battle and these tend to require the use of dodges or blocks to survive long enough to whittle down their health meters.

Overall, there is nothing fundamentally broken about the game and it functions well enough. The experience is very repetitive – enter room, mash buttons until the enemies stop moving, rinse and repeat. However, the core gameplay is fun enough that it does not feel tiresome; there's a certain exhilarating rush when you are in sync with the game's rhythm. Slashing waves of zombies is fun, the cel-shaded graphics give it a stylish vibe, and the chapters are short and digestible. Enemies tend to telegraph their attacks with a flash before striking, and if you hit the dodge just right the camera will zoom in to follow you as you weave past attacks. This is far and away the best part of the experience; when you string together three or four dodges consecutively, delivering punchy combos between each, it looks and feels terrific. There is also a lot of enjoyment to be had in playing the game as intended, flicking blood off your katanas in between long zombie-juggling attack strings and doing a half dozen cool finishes to end a fight. When Onee Chanbara is on, it's on.

But there are definitely issues.

First of all, all of Onee Chanbara's mechanics give an illusion of depth that is not really present. Even though playing the game at a high level of precision feels great, it never really punishes you for your mistakes. On Normal and Hard I felt like it wasn't a big deal to drop a combo or mess up a few dodges back to back. I never felt challenged to actually improve at the core gameplay. This is exacerbated by bosses which – although visually distinct – all end up feeling kind of same-y. You do your 2-3 dodges, smash x a bunch, and keep doing this until their health meters hit zero.

There are a lot of missed opportunities in the extra mechanical elements too. Berserk and Xtatic seem interesting at first, but you do not have much control over when those modes are activated. After fighting long enough they just kind of… happen. These super modes look amazing but leave you with the same movesets and the same objective – mash x a bunch. They essentially amount to modes that you can't control and don't change how you play, which makes them feel unnecessary and arbitrary – the opposite of how I ought to feel in a "super" mode.

None of the extra bells and whistles do much to change this basic formula either. Additional characters, extra weapons, the item shop between missions – all of these feel perfunctory at best. The most consistently useful mechanic was swapping characters, if for nothing else than to be an additional health bar during longer fights.

Thankfully, Onee Chanbara is not taxing or exhausting to complete. It took me roughly five and a half hours to finish the campaign, which is short enough that it probably won't last you the weekend. In one sense, this is a blessing. Its short length helps mitigate many of the above drawbacks; sure, it may seem repetitive and more flash in the pan than a full course meal, but at roughly six hours to finish it does not hang around long enough to frustrate you. And it looks good – if not stellar – while you're playing. I also prefer a game to end when it's time to end rather than arbitrarily pad out its length. There is a survival mode and some challenges to play as well, which are more of the same if that is what interests you, but there's a good chance you have gotten what you wanted to out of the game by the time the credits roll.

Fanservice is also a feature of the game...sort of? In some ways it is omnipresent – nearly every character in the plot is a woman in an outrageous costume. One look at Aya and you get a sense of what you are in for. But at the same time, you spend most of the game fighting zombies and either do not have time to ogle the characters or simply can't make them out amongst all the viscera. The character designs certainly are Something™ but if you were to buy this title for the gorgeous femme fatales I can't see how there's enough here to be satisfying.

...and at this point, we have to discuss the price tag.

Now, I am not the kind of person to ascribe value to game length. Sometimes games are shorter, and that's fine. In some cases preferable! Not every game has to be a 40+ hour novella, or a 100+ hour open-world experience. I think there are many games which technically give you “more” game in terms of raw hour count that actually are just adding cookie-cutter content without adding much in the way of fun.

That being said, Onee Chanbara currently sells for $59.99. That is a steep price tag for a game that is short and is style over substance by design. At that price point, you cannot help but compare it to, well, every other third-person action game on the market. You could easily grab entries from one or three other third-person hack-and-slash franchises and get as much style, with substantially more substance to boot. I wish I could say Onee Chanbara had unique qualities that set it apart from the pack, but other than the cel-shaded graphics – which I tend to enjoy but may not even be your cup of tea – there is not much to point to as a standout selling point.

Not to mention the number of times the game crashed on me and lost my save, forcing me to reload levels or redo boss fights I had already completed. Reading some of the other user reviews, this apparently wasn't only a unique problem for me, and others also experienced significant technical issues like framerate drops and so on, which feel particularly egregious in light of that hefty price tag.

That ends up being the real sticking issue for this release. Onee Chanbara is a solid game that I had fun playing. It's slick, a bit shallow, but doesn't overstay its welcome and when everything lined up I was picking up what it was putting down. Sadly, the game is not terribly rewarding or engaging, is very short for its price tag, and comes with at least a few technical issues. On its own it is hard to see it going toe-to-toe with the many other heavy hitters in the hack-and-slash space, and its current suggested price makes those comparisons unavoidable.

For this article I was given a review copy of the game, and played on PC via Steam.

Grant is the cohost on the Blade Licking Thieves podcast and Super Senpai Podcast.