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.
Similar games
Explore Oni guides
Oni in our writing
- Companion guide: Bungie: Halo, Marathon and the Console Shooter Reborn
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.