The Top Shelf: Case Files 011-015: "It's Oni Fair"

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done, five games at a time. Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Case File 011: FromSoftware's Kuri Kuri Mix

The PAL box art is literally the Japanese box art with a sweet fire decal around it.

• Original Release (JP): 07/12/2000.
• Not PS2 Exclusive (has a DS port)

The name might not be familiar, but this is the co-operative top-down puzzle-platformer known as The Adventures of Cookie & Cream over in the States. For whatever reason, Europe decided to retain the Japanese name. I sort of prefer it though. This is one of those games that, since I lack a second person to play it with, can't be given its proper due - if you've not seen it in action, it's very similar to that one co-op Mario Party 4 mini-game where one player pulls levers and turns wheels to allow the other player to move forward. You can play the story mode solo, though it's fairly awkward: you use both analog sticks to move the two characters concurrently. However, it's not so much the split controls that trips you up than the fact that you can only really focus on one character at a time. In spite of this, it's a fantastic and distinct with a surfeit of imagination and deceptively high difficulty hidden beneath its fluffy exterior. I suppose the most remarkable thing about this cutesy friendship game is that FromSoftware was behind it: the company has a long-reaching legacy that goes back many years before they hit the big times with Demon's and Dark Souls, but the majority of those games were equally grim dungeon-crawlers or dramatic mech sims. This, 3D Dot Game Heroes, their mascot-friendly Monster Hunter spin-offs and to a lesser extent the colorful Enchanted Arms and the extremely goofy Metal Wolf Chaos were comparative departures. I never finished the game and always meant to, even with the aforementioned single-player handicap, so I'm moving this one through to the next stage. Considered.

At this point, the only PCSX2 screenshots I'm happy with are title screens. Everything else is a blurry mess.

Case File 012: Level-5's Dark Cloud

• Original Release (JP): 14/12/2000.
• PS2 Exclusive!

Given the level of innovative confidence on display in this game developed for a still-new platform, it's odd to think that Dark Cloud is Level-5's first ever title. Level-5 was a studio set up only a couple years before by one Akihiro Hino as he departed from collapsing cult Japanese adventure game developer RiverHillSoft. They would go on to develop five games for Sony platforms before breaking from their exclusivity to create the Professor Layton series for Nintendo's DS handheld. Those five games just happen to be five of the greatest RPGs of that generation. It's a remarkable debut streak, to say the least. But I'm getting ahead of myself; I'll definitely be revisiting at least two more of those in the case files to come. Dark Cloud builds on the blueprint created by Quintet's 1992 dungeon-crawler SNES RPG Soul Blazer, establishing a world in which every town was suddenly wiped off the map, broken into pieces and hidden in the vast and dangerous dungeons underneath each one. By exploring the depths, the player recovers and re-establishes these buildings, landmarks, natural features and populace in an effort to recreate the world. However, the game goes one step further than its inspiration by affording the player some wriggle-room in how each village is restored, providing them some rough guidelines as to what should be placed where and in what capacity that turns this town-building mode into something approaching a logical puzzle game not unlike their later Laytons. If your instructions for one house is to have three bridges leading away from it, which location makes the most sense? How many river tiles will you need to place for those three bridges to work? And that's just the town-building mode; the dungeoneering itself has all sorts of mechanics to adjust to, as you strategically fight your way through crowds of monsters in real-time. The game had some flaws - there were far too many secondary playable characters to get used to any one of them, and item durability was both an unwelcome addition and very stringently addressed, with even the most upgraded, high-powered weapons disappearing entirely if they happened to break - but it was one of my first favorites for the system and a reassurance that the level of high-quality JRPGs I loved for the PlayStation 1 was definitely attainable on this new platform. Yet... for as much as I love this game, I want this shelf to be representative of the system as a whole first and foremost. That means I can't stack the deck by putting both Dark Cloud 1 and Dark Cloud 2 on there, and between this one and its sequel there's really no contest. Eliminated (with a great deal of sorrow).

Case File 013: Ubisoft Montpellier's Rayman Revolution

• Original Release (NA): 22/12/2000.
• Not PS2 Exclusive (it was originally a N64 game, and was ported to damn near everything)

Rayman 2 took Ubisoft's fledgling armless-but-not-harmless platformer mascot into the world of 3D, and Revolution is simply the graphically-updated PS2 port of that three-dimensional debut. For all my love of 3D platformers, I never could get into Rayman. Something about his stupid Aaron Carter haircut or how it skewed to a very young age group always put me off, in a manner similar to Dan's self-admitted dumb aversion to "kiddy" Sony platformers like Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper or Ratchet & Clank. While I recall playing a substantial amount of Rayman Revolution, I don't think I ever beat it; at that point, it was many years after its release, and there were better PS2 platformers around to choose from. Since playing Rayman Origins and Legends, however, I've come around on the chirpy Gallic fellow and his musical world of lums and teensies, so I might be convinced to give this one another viewing. It'll have one hell of a hill to climb to get past, say, Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy or Sly 2: Band of Thieves, but I figure it deserves a shot in the big leagues. The big shelf leagues. Considered.

Case File 014: Capcom's Onimusha

• Original Release (JP): 25/01/2001.
• Not PS2 Exclusive (received a Xbox port with way more stuff in it)

Our first 2001 game comes courtesy of Capcom, who back in their heyday were always ready with a brand new IP whenever a new console generation came around. Onimusha takes the blueprint of Capcom's action horror juggernaut Resident Evil to recreate that experience in Sengoku-era Japan (a surprisingly common route for spin-offs and spiritual successors, if Ryuu ga Gotoku Kenzan! and Pokémon Conquest are anything to go by). Demonic conspirators replaced Umbrella Corp, Nobunaga Oda would stand in for Albert Wesker, and zombies... well, zombies are evergreen, so to speak. However, Onimusha also helped set the stage for what would later be known as the "character action" genre, made more pronounced by the debut of Hideki Kamiya's Devil May Cry for Capcom later that same year. Onimusha's a short game, but features an intriguing number of new ideas and mechanics within a supernatural Japanese shell of a samurai investigating a castle filled with demonic entities named Genma, who have resurrected the badass warlord Nobunaga and are threatening to take over the entire country. It's one of my favorite, slightly older tropes in gaming made famous by the likes of Resident Evil's Spencer Mansion or the titular possessed castle of Castlevania: an immense singular location filled with mysteries to uncover that loops back in on itself in various ways. To my great chagrin, I bought up all the Onimusha games late in that console generation and have yet to play a single one for more than an hour or so. It's something I intend to rectify with The Top Shelf, and one of a handful of ulterior motives behind this series besides simply figuring out what to put on the system's highlight reel. Considered.

Don't mess with Japanese Adrien Brody. Especially when he's on a quest.

Case File 015: Bungie's Oni

• Original Release (NA): 29/01/2001.
• Not PS2 Exclusive (debuted on PC)

Likewise, Bungie's Ghost in the Shell-inspired third-person anime shooter/brawler wasn't something I ever got around to back when I had a PS2 plugged in and ready to start cartwheeling around with uzis, and I'll admit to only buying the game because I was curious to see what Halo's developers were working on before Halo. Technically speaking, Oni was made by a different studio within Bungie's purview, and that might explain why it feels significantly different to their usual self-serious space FPSes. It's not a game I can pass judgement on just yet, however, and so that means it's automatically qualified for the next stage. Considered.

Before the game is even loaded, you've seen Oni's gamine heroine Konoko kick the crap out of the camera during the Rockstar Canada logo animation and then you get this scene. I think someone on-staff liked the idea of getting their ass kicked by petite women. Did Joss Whedon have a hand in this?

Results

This update presents a considerable uptick in games I actually give a damn about, though due to the odd rules I've given myself the only eliminated game from this batch is the one I happen to like the most. We're now 5 for 15 for games that have a shot of being on the shelf, all of which are going to have to be revisited before I'm prepared to pull the plug on them.

It'll be a while until we get there - I've got another 170 games to process in a manner similar to the above, which might push me to review more than five at once - but the second round will probably resemble my "Indie Game of the Week" feature: short reviews on individual PS2 games as I play through them for a better sense of whether or not they hang with my system favorites. If there's a third round, it'll simply involve chipping away at what's left of that list until the number of games matches the number of remaining shelf spaces.

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