Onechanbara Z2: Chaos Hands-On Preview - Too Many Mooks

Onechanbara Z2: Chaos offers fast-paced combat against all the zombies you could wish for. All of them. More, in fact. More zombies than you could wish for. More zombies than you should reasonably ask for. Good gravy!, there are a lot of zombies.

That’s ultimately why Onechanbara Z2: Chaos is an average game. There’s a very delicate space that every game has to find, where its gameplay segments are long enough without feeling too long. It’s why a basketball game is 60 minutes, or a fight is usually a max of three rounds, or why racing games have a general number of laps that feels right for that particular game.

Most stages in Z2: Chaos felt too long, be it just a little or by quite a lot. The final areas in particular felt like they would never end. It gave me the same feeling as looking at pictures from a friend’s vacation around the world: “Damn, these are beautiful, but I can’t do 940 pictures in one sitting.” The photos were great, the stories were amazing, but after the 300th picture, I’d had enough. Likewise in Z2: Chaos, killing the zombies controlled well, looked decent enough, and felt satisfying, but after a certain point, I needed the stage to end.

This feeling of anxiety were only exacerbated by some stages being do-overs from the previous Onechanbara game and by some enemies (even bosses) being the same or slightly modified versions of older foes. Z2: Chaos didn’t feel entirely new, so it didn’t get as much leeway with lengthy stages.

There isn’t much the player can do to solve this problem. Upgrading weapons and skills, along with simple improving ones own abilities can cut down your clear time, but can’t alleviate the problem of largely empty stages packed with what is essentially filler.

While the core gameplay was good enough once I got my hands on it, times were very rare when I’d be looking forward to playing Onechanbara Z2: Chaos. Most of my progress could probably be attributed to my sense of obligation not to waste money. I bought this thing (Japanese version), and I don’t like the idea of getting less than what I paid for. But if I didn’t have that motivating factor—if this game had been a gift or something—I can only wonder if I’d have made it to the end yet.

It might be different if the stages were better-looking or had interesting things in them, but they aren’t and they don’t. The character models look quite good, but the backgrounds and enemies look terribly behind the times. It’s not a good kind of outdated look either, where an old game can still look nice years later, but quite the opposite and just not pleasant to look at. So you’ve got these big stages with nothing much to do, and you can’t even enjoy the scenery or have a good time exploring the area. It feels incomplete in one way, stretched too thin in another.

Combat performs well, with only a very small handful of harmless glitches and not a frame rate drop to speak of during my whole playthrough. This adds an extra feeling of reward and satisfaction to the routine of watching Kagura and Co. fly all about the air kicking, slicing, punching, and chopping as many zombies as they can shake a katana at.

Onechanbara Z2: Chaos offers a dead-center average gameplay experience with satisfying, action-packed combat but absolutely nothing else. Stages overstay their welcome, are packed with filler fights, and look bland to boot, while weapon upgrades, new costumes, and leaderboards didn’t add great feelings of reward. If this combat ends up in another game with a little more polish, it’s something to watch out for, but as it stands… meh. It was okay, I guess.

Onechanbara Z2: Chaos is a PS4 exclusive due out in North America on July 21. The Japanese version was played for this preview.