Oni (2001)
Oni is a 2001 shooter video game made by Rockstar Toronto and Bungie West.
In a near-future city choked by environmental collapse, Konoko is an agent of the TCTF, a tech crimes task force hunting a criminal organization called the Syndicate. Oni fuses hand-to-hand combat with gunplay in a style drawn from anime action films, letting players switch between weapons and bare-handed fighting mid-encounter. Konoko is efficient, quick, and haunted by gaps in her own history she cannot explain. The game was Bungie's one pure anime-influenced project before the Halo era.
Quick answers
What is Oni about?
In a near-future city choked by environmental collapse, Konoko is an agent of the TCTF, a tech crimes task force hunting a criminal organization called the Syndicate. Oni fuses hand-to-hand combat with gunplay in a style drawn from anime action films, letting players switch between weapons and bare-handed fighting mid-encounter. Konoko is efficient, quick, and haunted by gaps in her own history she cannot explain. The game was Bungie's one pure anime-influenced project before the Halo era.
When was Oni released?
Oni was released on 26 January 2001.
Who made Oni?
Oni was made by Rockstar Toronto, Bungie West and Rockstar Games.
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A few thoughts on Oni
Canaan is an anime series about a female operative with superhuman abilities sent into a city full of factions and secrets, sharing Oni's aesthetic of a lone woman cutting through a conspiracy. Angel Cop offers similarly gritty near-future law enforcement action for fans of the harder edge.
Agents whose own memories don't add up
Konoko fights through Oni's decaying city and her own unexplained memory gaps as a TCTF agent with a past someone erased. Canaan's operative and Angel Cop's black-ops police unit share that same anime-honed brutal efficiency, Ghost in the Shell's Major Kusanagi is a cyborg still working out who she really is, and Stranger Things' Eleven was shaped by a lab that never told her the truth.
Anime built on hand-to-hand fighting choreography
Oni sells its city-hopping manhunt on Konoko's fists as much as her guns, switching between armed combat and bare-handed strikes drawn straight from anime fight scenes. Rurouni Kenshin, Ranma 1/2, Fullmetal Alchemist, My Hero Academia and Assassination Classroom all build their action around that same physical, close-quarters choreography, even when their settings are worlds apart from Oni's collapsing metropolis.
Music for a city already lost to corporate control
Oni's TCTF wages an uphill fight against a syndicate running a city collapsing under its own weight, all gunmetal skylines and rain. Repo! The Genetic Opera plays like a soundtrack to that same corporate rot, Vangelis's Blade Runner score carries the same neon-noir dread, Deltron 3030 raps through an equally corrupted future, and Muse's Simulation Theory and Black Holes and Revelations both circle the same paranoia about hidden control.